Cute kids

As the editor of a community newspaper, my job occasionally involves taking photos, so early one recent morning I drove to a building not far from my house to take photos for an article about a Montessori school.

The lighting inside the school was pleasantly dim and the children unusually calm, a result of the natural lighting, the director explained.

I’m the mother of a 20-year-old, so it had been a while since I’d been around children so young, in this case, infants through age six. All around me, cute, curly-haired kids, some still rubbing sleep from their eyes, were reading books and wielding pretend hammers.

Stocking footed, I stepped into a classroom where I stooped low to take a photo of one youngster sucking her thumb while sitting in her teacher’s lap.

In a few minutes I had all the photos I needed, including some that I would never run but that reminded of how cute kids can be, with their tossled hair, runny noses and bare rumps.

Sleeping with Poe

“Now that’s a room!” my daughter Holly said as she walked into the Edgar Allan Poe room with its stuffed raven perched on the bureau and the pendulum-like scythe hanging over the brocade-covered bed. With its dark woodwork and red-velvet drapes, the hotel room looked like a scene out of “The Pit and the Pendulum” with a bit of “The Raven” thrown in.

Holly and I had come to the Sylvia Beach Hotel with its author-themed rooms for a mother-daughter vacation on the Oregon Coast.

“E. B. White is booked, but Jane Austen is available,” the reservation clerk told me when I called to book my room. E. B. White was my first choice. I’ve been a fan of White’s ever since I was a grad student and came across a collection of his humorous essays in a used-book store just off the University of Oregon campus.

But, as the clerk said, E. B. White was booked; and I’d already booked Poe for Holly, so when I found out the Austen room sat next door to the Poe room, I booked Jane for myself. That room included a small writing desk, stuffed chair, double bed with flowered bedspread and lace curtains.

Holly and I arrived in the small town of Newport in the middle of the afternoon. After parking in the nearby lot, we walked across the cobble-stoned street to the green, three-story, shingled hotel with its white picket fence and small garden.

The minute I stepped inside the pleasantly ramshackle hotel, I immediately felt at home. Unpretentious to the extreme, Sylvia Beach boasts uneven floors, wobbly lamps and two resident cats but no elevator, which meant Holly and I had to haul our suitcases to the third floor, where we checked out the cozy library with its fireplace and comfortable chairs.

Before dinner that night, we wandered up and down the halls, peeking into the unoccupied rooms. Holly got a kick out of the whimsical Dr. Seuss room, while I found myself wanting to move into the Emily Dickinson room, a spacious corner room set in the back.

That evening, Holly and I joined several of the other guests in the dining room to eat, visit and play a game called Two Truths and a Lie, in which everyone is asked to come up with two true stories and one untrue one about themselves. The trick was to try to fool everyone else.

I said I’d been to Denmark (true), had worked as a medical technologist (true) and had shot a moose (not true). Holly said she and her dad once got stuck in some sand while driving in the John Day Fossil Beds (true); knew how to play the violin, piano and guitar (true); and was valedictorian of her high-school class (close, but no cigar).

Neither Holly nor I fooled anyone, unlike the other guests, including a woman who said she once met Johnny Wisemiller―the actor who played Tarzan―and got his signature (true), hosted her own TV advice show (true) and played guard on a basketball team that won the state playoffs (not true).

Goody, the friendly owner of the hotel, told us several stories about herself, including one about a man she once knew who asked her to pretend to be his fiancé because he’d told his dying grandmother he was getting married (true); and another one about how, to surprise a friend on her 50th birthday, Goody stole the friend’s address book and used it to contact 50 men whom she asked to stop by the friend’s house and give her a kiss (true – 47 of the men showed up, including the woman’s Volvo repairman).

At the Sylvia Beach Hotel, I learned that night, telling stories is a highly valued form of entertainment.

Over the next couple of days, Holly and I met several of the other guests, including a freelance writer from San Francisco and a woman on sabbatical who’d come to the hotel to write.

During our stay, we did venture out long enough to visit the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse and check out the Old Bayfront Bazaar with its seashell jewelry boxes, seashell coasters and seashell coin purses. We even stopped by the Pirate’s Cove shopping area where we took pictures of ourselves standing in front of the pirate statues before having lunch (shrimp stew and clam chowder) and walking along the bay with is smelly crab nets and barking seals.

But it was inside the hotel, with its reading lamps, used books and photos of everyone from Kurt Vonnegut to W. B. Yeats, that we really relaxed.

On our last evening, Holly and I stayed up late playing the board game Balderdash (in you have to come up with word definitions) before adjourning to my room where we stretched out on the bed to read together. Holly flipped through pages of Cosmo Girl while I enjoyed a biography of Jane Austen, a copy of which I found in the room.

Experiencing the comfort of trees

“You’re permeable to your surroundings,” a neighbor of mine once said after I told her how difficult it was for me to work in a busy newspaper office, with dozens of people around me, the phone ringing, and the police scanner announcing the next house fire or traffic accident.

That job was short-lived. I now work by myself.

My whole self is influenced by where I am. When I’m in the city, everything, my thoughts and feelings, my writing, how I interact with the world, are, to a certain degree, shaped by the sharp edges of the buildings and severe angles of the streets.

In contrast, when I’m in the country, I become softer, rounder, more sensual, more organic and complex. When surrounded by nature, my writing projects seem to begin and end more naturally, reflecting the gently sloping hills and waving trees.

In some ways, if I’m not in the country, I don’t feel like I’m really me. It’s there that I relax and open up, become less intellectual, more spiritual and reconnect with whatever it is that I lose sight of in the city.

Which explains why, every so often, armed with a cup of coffee, I play hooky and head out of town, to experience the comforting presence of trees. While there, driving this way and that down the curving roads, it feels as if the trees are brushing the air and me clean, as if, like green filters, they’re scrubbing away all that’s unnecessary and not me.

There’s something about the strong, silent presence of trees that makes me feel like I don’t have to be doing anything. Sure-footed and undemanding, trees provide a strong consistency. Their branches have a muffling effect on sounds and my thoughts, setting me above my concept of myself; their overhead canopy feels soothing.

Reaching high while digging deep, trees solve so much with their calm presence, as they march up the side of a hill, anchor the edge of a field or just stand there skirted by thick undergrowth.

Deep rooted and stalwart, they encompass me with their arms and bless me with their indifference to life’s successes and failures. “Everything is all right,” they seem to be saying, while swaying in life’s breeze.

Redhead

A few weeks ago, I went to Oregon Home magazine’s 10-year anniversary party.

“I thought you’d have red hair!” Sheila, the editor, said upon seeing me for the first time.

Until that moment, although I’d been writing for Sheila for several years, we’d never actually met.

“Wait. Let me get used to your face,” she said while forming a frame with her hands.

I’d seen photos of Sheila in the magazine, so had some idea of what to expect although, in person, she is even more attractive, more exotic looking. She also has a calming presence, a result, perhaps, of having to herd a lot of freelance writers, including me.

“I wasn’t expecting brunette,” she shouted over the sound of a man singing Jimmy Buffett songs and the chatter of the other partiers.

The odd thing was, until two days prior, I had been a redhead. Then, in one of those oh-what-the-heck moods, I had my hair stylist apply a heavy dose of dark hair color onto my locks. In addition to being an editor, could Sheila also be psychic?

Of all my editors, Sheila is one of my favorites. At the party she not only acknowledged I wrote for other publications before encouraging me to “Keep sending ME your good essays,” but she also made sure I got something to eat and asked if I’d found a writer’s getaway cabin. (No, not yet.) After talking with me for several minutes, she let me go with a “Well, no doubt you’re tired,” a response to an earlier email of mine in which I said I might not make the party because, depending on how the work day went, I sometimes turned into a pumpkin by 7 p.m.

As I headed out of the noisy party room and into the dark night, making my way down a rain-glistened city sidewalk to my car, for the first time I realized something that, in the flurry of making a living, I sometimes forget ― that, in addition to being a coworker, an editor can also be a friend.

Forced Entry

People keep breaking into the office building where I rent a small room in which to write. Once, they broke through the front door and took the landlord’s bank bag, which didn't contain any money but did contain the keys to the rest of the building, including the door to my office. I immediately called my husband Dave to discuss the costs, advantages and idiocy of installing a deadbolt on my office door. Then I called my insurance agent because I don't have a therapist. I did have one, had a naturopath, too ─ as much as anyone can actually have a naturopath ─ and a family doctor who had a habit of giving me quick advice after complaining to me about her ex.

But the day of the latest break-in, I called my insurance agent to find out how much it would cost to insure my office equipment in case someone broke in and took everything.

"About $100 a year," he told me, "but first you'd have to put together an itemized list of all your stuff."

That list would include the bookshelf that's bolted to the wall and the desk Dave made me that weighs a ton. Even if the thieves were strong I don't think they could take that. So that left the cheap paper holder and wobbly desk lamp, the one I cut myself on while getting it out of the box.

I considered doing all of this but didn’t, in spite of the fact that three days after the break-in, I came to work to find graffiti splattered all over the building. John the landlord and I wondered what it meant. To me, the graffiti looked like a foreign language, intriguing and mysterious, like those marks hobos used to put on fence posts to tell fellow travelers if the woman of the house was generous or likely to chase them away with a broom. I wondered if the front of my office building had been marked "Easy Target. Come on in. Lots of Good Stuff Inside."

John is a rather timid man considering how big he is. He never evicts a tenant, no matter how obnoxious they are. More than once, he's had renters rip the place apart. Once, the sign over his wife's downstairs hair salon was plastered with paint. One Christmas Eve, vandals smashed the plate-glass window in the front of the salon, leaving nothing between the white-haired women sitting under the hair dryers and the all outdoors.

Another time, someone broke in by throwing a rock through the high bathroom window before climbing inside, breaking the sink and toilet and leaving a piece of finger on the jagged edge of the window glass.

And then there was the time someone broke through the back door and kicked down the wall into Joe's jewelry shop before setting off the alarm and high-tailing it out of there. And the time someone got inside and rummaged around in the basement. That time, they didn't break down the basement door but used the key hanging beside it instead, for which John was grateful.

One day, I was sitting in my office when John knocked on the door.

"If your eyes start to water," he said, "get out. It's mace. Joe's safe is the old kind that, if a burglar breaks into, they get sprayed with mace. It got them. They dropped all their tools and didn't get any jewelry."

They did break some lights, though, and a mirror in the salon before making off with a roll of pennies and the Kiwanis mints.

Later that same day, John showed me the office next door to mine. I was thinking of renting it to use as a classroom. Until recently, a middle-aged woman had worked there selling baby portraits over the phone. She'd moved out because the power substation across the street kept messing with her pacemaker. Anyway, there were still baby pictures stapled all over the walls, water stains on the ceiling, unpainted sills and an old, gray rug.

"We're going to have to wash down the walls," John told me. What with the break-in, it had been quite a day.

"Go home, have a beer," I told him.

"Can't," he said. "Gave up beer and cigarettes."

He gave up cigarettes, he told me, by chewing nicotine gum. After giving up drinking, his liver had gone down in size, and his enzymes had returned to normal.

"I don't miss the beer," he told me, "but I sure do miss those cigarettes. I dream about them. I dream I take a puff on the first half and then flick off the ash and then inhale the second half and put it out in an ashtray. But I don't have an ashtray beside my bed. The wife and I both quit. Two months later, she had surgery for lung cancer due to cigarette smoking. They removed the lower lobe of one lung. Boy, that's one way to make sure you don't start up again, to see someone lying there in the hospital with tubes running out of them. Everyday they would come in with a pair of pliers and run it down the tube. The wife said it felt like they were pulling her insides out. But she still says if they tell her she has six months to live, she's going to go out and buy a carton of cigarettes and smoke them up before she goes to bed. We miss cigarettes."

With that, John waved goodbye and then headed back down the stairs.

The Relaxing Presence of Horses

I’m so proud of my daughter. Holly knows how to ride a horse. This is amazing to me. I know nothing about horses. I’ve sat on a horse maybe twice in my whole life and both times I found myself thinking Boy, this baby is huge. Now might be a good time to get off.

In contrast, Holly can not only sit on a horse but groom and ride one. I know because earlier this week I drove out to the Bridlewood riding stables where she’s taking horseback riding lessons through Mt. Hood Community College.

As I got in my car, leaving Portland behind me, I felt myself physically and mentally slow down, as the grid-like streets gave way to country roads, twisting and turning their way to the stables, which sat in a small valley in the woods outside of town.

After parking my car under a row of trees, I got out and walked into the dimly lit barn, where the soft sounds of people talking were muffled by the hay covering the worn floorboards.

The barn was rich with the scent of horse and life. Three or four dogs wandered about. I breathed in the smell of leather, listened to the soft swish of someone sweeping out a horse stall, from the deep interior of which came the sound of shifting hoofs.

I relaxed, welcomed the break from the intellectual demands of work, as the low afternoon sun threw deep slants of light into the shadowy barn.

I looked around me, at the thick horse blankets and deeply tooled, leather saddles, at the animals’ coarsely veined stomachs, the ropes and leashes and long-haired dogs. I watched as the students coaxed their horses out of their stalls, brushed them and saddled them up.

In the riding arena, I stood to one side as Holly and the other students rode their horses (named Abby and Lucky and Dusty) in lazy circles around the inside of the barn while the instructor, a soft-spoken man with a slight limp, stood in the center and offered suggestions: “Heels down. Toes up.” The students, sitting relaxed in their saddles, gently urged their steeds forward, when they weren’t clicking to back them up.

Life seemed so organic, the pace so slow, as if life had no pace at all. I felt a welcome sense of relief, from writing and work and the city, as all around me, the horses gently snickered and shook their manes, their black eyelashes half covering their dark eyes.

Tearing Down Fences

My daughter is grown now, but during the days and months right after her birth, life was a bit of a jumble.

The small workroom in the back corner of my home where I’d used to write, read and occasionally nap now had to serve as a nursery as well, for a new baby had moved in our house.

I could no longer draw neat lines around who I was or what I did, for my infant daughter Holly, like a free-spirited gardener, had torn down the fences between the fields of my life. As a result, the rabbits were nibbling at the lettuce, and the cows were having a field day in the flower beds.

Tell-tale signs of the days-old gardener cropped up everywhere – baby blankets threatened to topple from the bookshelf, diapers sat next to a book on how to make a living as a writer, and a button-eyed Teddy bear peered down on the sleeping infant. On my desk, a night lamp in the shape of a hobby horse threatened to run circles around my computer, while behind me on the doorknob hung a frilly, doll-size dress.

The wonderful confusion began simply enough on the cold, clear January day Dave and I brought Holly home from the hospital where she was born. It was Dave who did the honors. Not knowing any better, he simply picked the bundled babe out of her car seat and carried her up the steps and into the house, transporting her through the kitchen and down the hall and not stopping until he reached the back room where he laid her down in the borrowed bassinet.

There was no hint, in the neatness and quickness of the act, of the wonderful chaos that would follow. Dave soon learned the importance of tiptoeing around the sleeping baby and her short-tempered mom, while I learned to write at odd moments on bits of scrap paper, used envelopes and note pads left by the furnace man.

Though Dave made a valiant effort to contain some of the confusion by building yet another set of shelves, I soon learned that making room in your life for a child means not just re-arranging the furniture but re-organizing one's priorities as well. I was left with a life in which the garden rows were not as neat, one in which the distinction between what was inside the garden and what was out was less clear, but one in which, when all was said and done, the crop would be more rich, more complete.