Jennifer Jeffrey, Writer & Editor

Step Inside My Other Living Room (the Ace Hotel in Portland)

There's a place in Portland that I like to think of as my Other living room: the main floor lobby in the Ace Hotel on Stark Street. If you could see it, you would want it to be your Other living room, too. Here's why:

- It is lined with cushy, olive green couches and has funky salvage-y pieces scattered around just so.

- It has a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with books.

- It has a Photo Booth. Who doesn't like a Photo Booth?

- It has a door that opens into Stumptown Coffee, which might be the best coffee on the planet. The espresso is smooth and creamy, rich and dark without a hint of bitterness.

- Stumptown Coffee sells a cookie that might be the best cookie on the planet. When I wrote that I wasn't that interested in food these days, I meant to write "... with the exception of the chewy dark chocolate cookie at Stumptown in Portland, Oregon." This cookie has a crackly top and a chocolatey, walnut-studded interior that resolves into ooey-chewy goodness inside your mouth. Is it worth booking a trip to Portland for? Oooh, yeah.

This is the lobby-living room inside the Ace Hotel:

This is the counter at Stumptown, above which swirl the aromas of roasted espresso beans and smoky dark chocolate and pine needles:

Okay , it doesn't smell like pine needles. But this is Portland, land of pine & fir trees, and doesn't it sound poetic?

An Awkward Pause

Scene: the living room in the farmhouse on a grey-blue Oregon day.

I'm holding my nephew. My mother is puttering around the room.

"It's funny," she remarks suddenly. "When I look back on old pictures of the girls when they were babies, there aren't hardly any pictures of me holding them.  I'm not sure why you were holding them and not me."

My heart lurches painfully against my rib cage. "Well," I reply, cautiously, "you couldn't hold them because of your back. You were in too much pain."

An awkward pause.

"Oh," she says, looking at the stack of papers in her hand. "Right."

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Babygazing

I've been a bit distracted lately. Having a tough time concentrating. Finding it hard to get any work done.

I'll tell you why: I've been babygazing.

It's addictive.

Once you start, it's almost impossible to stop.

Especially when the baby is a newborn nephew, four days old.

Especially when his skin is so soft and tender that running your fingers across it feels like discovering a brand new texture. Like the insides of a rose petal, only far more delicate. Like a raindrop feels when it slides across your cheek.

His elbows are the diameter of my thumb. His ears are tiny snails curled against his downy head.

Every move he makes is more riveting than a blockbuster; I could watch him for hours. He folds his hands into fists and holds them against his ears while he peers cautiously around the room. He is an explorer recently landed in a foreign country. He doesn't know the language yet, but he listens carefully, blinking in surprise as the teakettle sings or the dog barks. From time to time, he makes faint mewling noises and wrinkles his nose. On the rare occasions that he cries, the thin, translucent skin of his eyelids turns a deep crimson.

Sometimes, while he's sleeping, his eyebrows knot into an expression of dismay. What could possibly be wrong, baby? Other times he smiles, as if he's enjoying a private joke. Tell us all about it!

Shh! His breath is like the smallest wave on the ocean. It goes in :: whoosh :: it goes out.

I'll be back.

As soon I'm finished babygazing.

I Love You, I Do

While I was growing up, my family failed at Christmas.

There are so many reasons why, and the reasons are muddy and difficult to explain without the companion encyclopedia to our Unique Brand of Strange. Among them are that we didn’t have any amount of extra money to introduce festivity into the season; if we had had the money, it is doubtful that we would have used it to do something Hallmark-ian, because we were deeply conflicted over the commercial nature of the holiday, with all of its tawdry tinsel and tinny bells. The season was, for us, a time to celebrate Jesus’ birth, and yet we despised it more than any other time of year. It reminded us of how different we were, even as we congratulated ourselves for being so high-minded.

I say “we” because, when you are young and don’t yet have fully formed opinions, you absorb the general feelings of the greater organism that is The Family.

I do know that I speak for all of us when I say that we couldn’t wait for Christmas to be over. Every year, we felt a dull thud of dread when carols began to waft over the radio, and we collectively held our breath until the calendar page flipped past the 25th. Most of us still feel a sense of nausea in the pit of our stomachs when December approaches.

Oh, but then came February.

I don’t think that my parents consciously intended to try and make up for our failed Christmases, but when Child Number 5’s birthday rolled around, right next to Valentine’s Day, our collective mood experienced a remarkable transformation.

We draped red and pink streamers from the ceiling. We tied balloons to the backs of the dining room chairs. We made cupcakes and sugar cookies and smothered them with icing and red candy hearts. Technically, it was a birthday party for one person, but in fact it was a celebration for all of us.

After I left home, bitter and resentful at my weirdly impossible family, the tradition evolved further. My parents began to make an event of the day.  One year they organized a scavenger hunt. One year they celebrated at a restaurant in downtown Portland. One unseasonably warm year, they created an elaborate dinner and served it outside. They made Valentines and gave gifts.

Without ever intending it to be so, Valentine's Day became our holiday, a day to escape our usual seriousness and be lighthearted and extravagant.

My mother called me this morning to tell me that they had their celebration last night; all of my siblings who still live in the Portland area traveled back out to the farm for what has become a cherished tradition. They made dinner and played games. "We wish you could have been here with us," she said. "But we put something in the mail for you."

This many years later, my bitterness and resentment have given way to a more clear-eyed acceptance of who we were, and why. And somehow it seems fitting, and wonderful, that this day that celebrates love is the day that my family comes together to laugh, and make merry just for the sake of it.

Today I would like to say to my strange, impossible, weirdly fantastic family: I love you, I do.

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Photo above: taken yesterday - will you look at those gorgeous pink blossoms? If that doesn't call for a cupcake or a piece of fabulous chocolate, I don't know what does. XOX

Cheese Curd Memories & Ice Cream Dreams

This is what I had for lunch today: crisp-tart slices of Pink Lady apples, hunks of Tillamook Extra Sharp Cheddar, and a handful of toasted almonds.

For a simple spread with no cooking involved, it made me unreasonably happy.

It had to be the cheese.

I haven't eaten Tillamook cheese in a long while, but one bite whisked me back to Oregon, and the occasional afternoon my family spent together in our brown Ford station wagon, packed bony-elbow-to-bony -knee like crabs in a pot, hurtling down the road away from the farm and towards the craggy, foggy, stunningly beautiful Oregon coast.

Until you've been a farm kid with dirt-packed fingernails and sneakers flecked with chicken poo, you can't imagine how exciting it was to get away from the drudgery of pinning wet clothes to the clothesline and hoeing the garden for a few hours. Especially when our destination was one of the most wonderful places on earth: the Tillamook Cheese Factory.

The Tillamook Cheese Factory was to us what Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory was to Charlie: pure magic.

It took forty-five minutes to get from our house to Tillamook, and we spent the time singing hymns and pinching each other stealthily as the wagon rolled by fields and barns and thick stretches of fir trees. By the time we arrived - rumpled, crumpled, and snarling - we couldn't wait to escape the Gran Torino and run across the vast parking lot towards the huge white factory.

so grateful am i

The wine glasses have been polished and returned to their cabinet, and the leftover turkey has been tucked away in the refrigerator. Thanksgiving Weekend is nearly over.

I don’t want it to slip away without mentioning how grateful I am.

If you’ve read between the lines in my (scant) posts over the last few months, you know that it’s been a tough year for me on the personal front. There has been much sadness, and many tears, and more sleepless nights than I can count. My heart is still raw and punky and sore, and summoning my usual optimism has felt like a chore.

But that's not the whole story. Not by a long shot. I could easily stay stuck on the sad, discordant events of 2007, but the fact is that they’re only a small part of the rich narrative that has run through the year.

This weekend, I’ve taken some time to reflect on all that is good and precious and true in my life. There is so much – it makes me weak in the knees when I think of it.  I’m a blessed girl, truly I am.

Make a Wish, Mamacita!

Last week, as I was sorting through an old box of stuff, I came across this picture of my mother, circa 1972. Isn’t she a hottie?

Not that she would want me to say that. She blushes easily, my mom. She doesn’t like the spotlight; she listens more than she talks. She is a woman of strong convictions, but she holds them quietly. More than twenty years ago, she was already passionate about natural foods, and believed that organic was the only way to go. When people challenged her on this, she blushed all the way to the roots of her glossy brown hair, but she stood her ground.

Her early  influences were Adelle Davis, Frances Moore Lappé (Diet for a Small Planet was a bit hit in our house) and Sugar Blues by William Dufty. She joined the first Rodale Book Club, and read each month's shipment before she carefully wrapped it up and sent it back. She read everything on nutrition and health that she could get her hands on, and she sought out people with "alternative" ideas. We didn't have health insurance, but we did have cod liver oil and raw garlic and all the vegetables we could eat, thanks to my mother.

I’ll never forget riding across the countryside with her and watching her point out a crop duster hovering over the fields. “Roll up the windows," she said tersely. "He’s spraying deadly poisons all over the ground." Her voice was grave. “People are going to eat that food.” We all felt the gravity of what was taking place right in front of our eyes. “What do you think will happen to that man?” she asked us. “He’s breathing in all of those fumes. Do you think his lungs will suffer?”

Those are the kinds of conversations that stick with a person.