Jennifer Jeffrey, Writer & Editor

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.

Apples Don’t Pair So Well with Tea

Several weeks ago, staring at my 3-year-old Apple keyboard, I experienced a fit of shame: its formerly gleaming white QWERTY keys were stained by the grime hiding in the swirls that decorate my index and middle and forefinger, the digits that depress the keys hundreds of times each day. Worse, the clear plastic cover that looked so stylish when it was new was now marked with the mundane details of my life: cracker crumbs hiding between the keys, flakes of chocolate nestled down deep, a stray Petra hair – all impervious to the corner of a business card, or a Q-tip, or my fingernail.

This is the life of a writer: tap, tap, tap, translating thoughts into words, ideas into sentences, imagination into paragraphs, one letter at a time.

Dreams and dirt, residing together.

Then I came across this wonderful solution, and one afternoon, I gleefully removed all the keys with the blunt edge of a butter knife, stuck my soiled keyboard into the dishwasher and turned the cycle to ON.

Carol Deane Jeffrey: January 29, 1924 - October 24, 2007

Two Wednesdays ago, on October 24, my Grandma Jeffrey woke up early, as she always did. She made a pot of oatmeal for breakfast, as she did most mornings, and then she accompanied my grandfather, her husband of 61 years, to Fitness over Fifty. Afterwards, they delivered Meals On Wheels together. They valued their independence so much that they felt deeply for those who didn't have it. This was just one of the ways that they gave back.

At home in the early afternoon, they raked leaves on their large, sloping lawn. The vibrant colors in one of the leaves caught my grandmother’s eye, and she twirled it in her fingers and slipped it inside my grandfather’s breast pocket. She must have chuckled as she did so, the soft, throaty laugh that everyone around her knew so well.

An hour later, upon walking into the downstairs level of the home where she had lived for more than five decades, she placed her foot on the stairs and immediately fell backwards.

Gone.

Her heart stopped beating in the middle of a clear fall day. A day spent going and doing and laughing. Just the way she would have wanted it.

Only too soon.