Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

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  • ‘Perfect’ neighborhood. Well, for me

    ‘Perfect’ neighborhood. Well, for me

    Of course I would love the Friendly Street neighborhood where I live. It’s the official name of the neighborhood in Eugene because Friendly Street runs through its heart.

    It’s walkable. There’s a small grocery store that has everything you need. A food truck quad with sheltered dining. Four parks (two tiny, two large) within five blocks of our house. Two churches, in case a god needs a house. Pizza place, bus stops, big trees everywhere.

    Here’s what it lacks: homeowner association rules. I’m not exactly against rules that suggest people create tidy landscapes and restrict the presence of beat-up cars and junk. I like a perfectly coiffed garden as much as anybody. I just wouldn’t want to live where such rules go overboard.

    One of our neighbors has a dinosaur garden. It’s adorable, always changing, and has a little treat box for the dogs walking by with their owners.

    There’s much human-powered moving around in the neighborhood, which is why some folks who live at the top of a steep hill have added an encouraging sign for people huffing and puffing upwards.

    There are perfect gardens in the neighborhood. There are wildly out of control gardens. There are complete disaster yards with broken down vehicles that haven’t moved since I’ve been living here (eight years now). Somebody has chickens. Somebody throws peanuts into the street daily for the crows and the squirrels. Somebody has too much stuff and their front yard has now become a crazy-quilt kind of living room with comfy seating and little tables and art hung in the trees and strings of lights and slogans recalling the hippie years.

    It might not be a neighborhood where everyone would feel relaxed. For me, it’s, well, home.

  • Hard kind of love, also joy

    As I read Kathy Watson’s compelling memoir Last Morning at Nora’s Table, I found myself thinking about Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Both books hinge on a shocking death, but Watson’s story is, for me, the more powerful.

    Watson starts the memoir in the kitchen of her first restaurant, then reveals in well-structured chapters how a woman with a background in journalism and no formal culinary training becomes a celebrated chef in Oregon thanks to the two restaurants she opens in the Columbia Gorge.

    Watson’s father died in a horrific car accident when she was just six years old. Her deeply unstable mother wasn’t up to the task of raising her two children. By the time Watson was nine, she was doing all the cooking in the house.

    The book toggles between Watson’s steep learning curve in the restaurant business and the story of her painful childhood with a mother as likely to backhand her for a small infraction like spilling milk as to turn warm and generous with a surprise gift. This non-chronological structure can fail an author if one storyline proves more compelling. But Watson is as deft on the page as she is with the recipes that made her meals so remarkable they drew diners from across the Pacific northwest.

    Her emotional cadence gives the book a rhythm that feels like a classic day in the Columbia Gorge where the weather can go from brooding to lit with incandescent beauty in a heartbeat.

    Watson has an eye for the telling detail. Here’s how she describes her first stab at cooking when her mother, in too much pain to feed her children, remains in bed.

    In the kitchen, I dragged a red vinyl chair over to the electric stove and poured a can of Campbell’s Vegetable Beef Soup into a pot and added a can of water. I took two eggs and rested them next to the stove. I had watched Dad cook eggs, whistling Dvořák, his long, muscled arms moving the skillet and spatula with ease.

    The recipes tucked among the chapters made me want to go shopping immediately and get busy in the kitchen.

    This fine memoir reveals a woman’s struggle to value herself. It documents a husband’s sturdy devotion. It renders the beauty and challenges of life in the Columbia Gorge in exquisite detail. It’s an intriguing collection of recipes that respects Oregon’s local foods.

    It is also—in a sharp, unflinching way—a daughter’s love story to a broken mother.

    Reading it, I felt enriched by the power of the human spirit. But I was also a little sad that I never had the chance to eat at Nora’s Table.

    The book comes out in February, but can be preordered online.

  • Himalayan blues in my yard? That’s a high bar

    Himalayan blues in my yard? That’s a high bar

    The National Shrine of St. Thérèse overlooks the deep waters of Lynn Canal northwest of Juneau, Alaska. It’s more retreat center than tourist destination, although visitors do find their way to the quiet gardens and the chapel that sits on a tiny island you reach by crossing a stone causeway.

    We visited a couple of years ago while waiting to catch the ferry for a ride back to the Lower 48. Walking the Merciful Love Labyrinth, I stopped still at the Himalayan blue poppies edging the narrow path. I’d only seen them once before along the Japanese paths within the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, B.C. Meconopsis baileyi is a cousin of the Oriental poppy—Papaver orientale—that comes in bright reds and oranges. Both kinds have delicate, paper-thin petals. But the Himalayan blues—the ones I love—look like shreds of sky.

    Their home territory, roughly 10,000 feet in the Himalayas, means they like cool ,wet summers. Finding them in Southeast Alaska and in British Columbia makes complete sense.

    What makes much less sense is me buying a seed packet. What are the chances I can coax them to blossom in my yard, a mere 400 feet above sea level and with summer temperatures that can hit 100 degrees?

    Still, I do have microclimates in my yard, shady, damp zones that might work.

    The seeds are in the freezer, and I have scoped three places they might find comfy. In early winter, the seeds will come out of the freezer and be started indoors. Then we shall see.

    Perhaps the blues will be outraged at being expected to grow at this latitude and altitude. But seeds want to live and grow and become, will do it if given half a chance. Maybe Eugene—with some coddling from me—will give them three-quarters of a chance.

    Photos by Susan Palmer