The night I arrived in Portland in 1971, I fit my kitten Flannery, myself, and a small suitcase into the back cubby of a black 1949 VW bug called Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles had no back seat. The cushion was covered in a psychedelic faux Peter Max print—giant orange, yellow, and red flowers. Flannery was my first kitten, this was my first ride in a car with a name, and my first time in a state where snowfalls were rare. Mephistopheles squeaked to a stop at a house on Morrison and 33rd. Several other young people greeted me warmly. Did I think for a moment that I’d grow old with these people? I did not.

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Youth seeks youth, and a sizable influx of people with faces bare of laugh lines had recently arrived Portland. In our house and many others, cats and dogs had names like Rosa (Luxemburg), Che (Guevara), Susan B. (Anthony), Sojourner (Truth), Lavender (Menace), Alice (B. Toklas), Hannah (Arendt). You have an idea of the politics. Households full of gay men and lesbians sprang up. There was a radio station (KBOO), a food co-op (People’s), a women’s bookstore (A Woman’s Place), and a hangout (Darcelle’s). We pressed book after book into one another’s hands and read and talked and wandered toward the fragrance of marijuana brownies. 

Occasionally, Mephistopheles was stolen. It was an easy vehicle to start without using a key. We’d look outside and see no little black bug crouched on the street, and a gloom would fall upon us. But within a day, a week, or a month, one of us would spot Mephistopheles in the Lloyd Center parking lot or on a dead end near Mount Tabor. We’d celebrate Mephistopheles’s homecoming. We’d celebrate everything and anything, and sing and dance and drift off into couples and drama. Wasn’t this the way life would always be? 

I still know and love several of the people I met when living in that first house on Morrison and 33rd. A lot of those long-ago hippies are still wandering these streets; of course, they’re not recognized as such except by one another. I could not have foreseen that there would be far more snow than advertised, more cats after Flannery, or that my days as an old woman would be every bit as interesting, in fact more so, than those of my youth. At the houseboat moorage where I’ve lived for 45 years, some of the older women here go for walks together. Not often but sometimes, we tell stories about being young. Mostly, though, we talk about our lives now. 

In these past 15 years—I’m now 79—I’ve written more than I’d written altogether up to then. Before Portland, I’d been the lone woman and undergraduate in a graduate fiction writing class led by Richard Yates, then my writing hero, in Iowa City. The men in that class did all they could to convince me that the world did not need to hear from me, and after those two years, I put writing aside. But as time passed and my Portland roots grew deeper, I met Teresa Jordan, Joanne Mulcahy, Judith Barrington, Kim Stafford, Ursula Le Guin, Molly Gloss, and other local writers—all so different from that crew in Iowa City.  

These writers and neighbors and Mephistopheles co-owners are all among the people I’ve grown old with, and their good humor and intelligence, along with our mutual affection, opened me back up to my own writing. I never could have dreamed that I’d see us all turn 60, 70, 80, or that my writing self would come roaring back so strongly from my mid-60s on. I can’t imagine that growing older elsewhere could possibly be better.

When Mephistopheles ferried me around town and old seemed like another country, I wish I’d known that my generation would not perform old age using the same scripts as previous generations. This is never the case. We each bring our whole selves to these later chapters, each of us shaped by living in specific times and places in community with others—mine on Morrison and 33rd and here on this houseboat moorage, just past the sign for the vegan strip club. This quirky, open-minded city turned out to be the best place for me to be both young and old after all. 

Andrea Carlisle is the author of There Was an Old Woman: Reflections on These Strange, Surprising, Shining Years, released by Oregon State University Press.