Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

recent posts

  • What are you saving for winter?

    What are you saving for winter?

    My strategy is working.

    Last year after visiting Stockholm and learning about this “cozy winter” vibe they espouse, I decided to give it a try.

    Stockholm has long cold winters.

    Eugene, Oregon has mild, rainy, medium-length winters. My first winter in Oregon—after a decade in Anchorage—I thought I’d died and come to heaven. No snow, green lawns, camellias blooming in February. February? I couldn’t believe it. Well-meaning folk would ask me how I was coping with winter and I’d start giggling.

    But after three decades of low-cloud-ceiling Oregon winter, I understand the question. Sure it might be 30 below in Anchorage, sure daylight might only make a brief appearance. But blue sky shows up regularly, and the long dawn and longer twilight have a kind of magic.

    Flat gray skies that last for days, that’s a different kind of mental burden. After about five winters, I began to understand.

    Last winter, I concocted my own version of cozy. Lots of charming light everywhere, and embroidery projects. I love embroidery, and generally always have something going on. But not this year. I put all the fabric and threads away in April. They won’t come out again until December.

    Yesterday, a fun kit arrived in the mail. It’s from Mary Corbet, who maintains the best teaching and inspiration website I’ve found online. The little kit and stitch-along project she prepared feels like a perfect lead-in to get me limbered up for the complex bird embroidery I plan, something along the lines of the osprey project from last year.

    When the kit arrived, I tore it open immediately to feel the fine linen, check out the mix of thread colors and ponder a thing I haven’t done before: add tiny beads. I wanted to get started right away. But, hold up there, Kemosabe. Embroidery is for winter.

    Yes, okay. Setting it aside, checking the calendar. Only three months and change to go.

    Photos by Susan Palmer

  • In praise of the forced pause

    In praise of the forced pause

    An electric vehicle changes everything about a road trip.

    I’m a deep believer in flying down the highway at 60 mph. The momentum, the smacking rhythm of the tires, the small-town gas stations, the pee breaks in the sagebrush by the highway in the dark. There’s music in it, somehow.

    Alone in the car, my creativity fans out for deep consideration. The idea for my first novel came to me on a road trip between Logan, Utah and Kalispell, Montana. The characters for the second novel muscled their way in somewhere along Highway 101 between Brookings and Bandon.

    Traveling with another person, I’ve found that conversation has time to unwind and rewind and play again. Spend a week on a road trip with someone and you know them in ways you rarely know people.

    I once logged 11,000 miles on a six-week meandering trip from Anchorage to Phoenix and back again.

    The route I’m most familiar with, though, is Eugene, Oregon to Lethbridge, Alberta. I’ve run that route maybe two dozen times. In the last five years before my mother died, I did it twice a year.

    Two months ago, Craig bought a fully electric vehicle and we’ve done two road trips in it. First thing. You don’t wing a road trip across vast stretches of the West in an EV. Sucking down the power to nothing in an EV isn’t an option. Not like a gas powered oops which results in a slog to a gas station and humping back the gallon of fuel to your car.

    The unexpected benefit: We’ve stopped in two towns I’ve sped by for decades.

    Ritzville, Washington? Always a flash on our way out or home on that endless stretch of Interstate 90 and Highway 395 between Spokane and the Columbia Gorge’s Interstate 84.

    This year we stopped in Ritzville because it has fast charging power. And because charging the EV takes longer than filling a fuel tank, we had time for dinner. Which is when we discovered an Indian restaurant with rich aromatic food you want to linger over. Ritzville has shifted from a signpost to an actual place I view fondly.

    Later on that same trip we dropped in on Grass Valley, Oregon, on Highway 97. Hot summer day, low on power. Grass Valley has exactly one store that does quadruple duty: liquor, groceries, deli. Also, a charging station. We had cold drinks at the store with its antique-household-goods decoration while we waited for the car to power up.

    At first I didn’t care for this slowing down and pausing.

    But I’m shifting away from my urge to hurry. I’m looking around. And it’s not just what’s here at this place I must wait. It’s how did this place come to be here? What do they do here? Who might I meet here?

    In Grass Valley, the owner of the store was helping out in the deli, chatting up customers at the register and grinning when I congratulated her on the presence of mind to add the charging station. She was of an age where you’d expect her to be relaxing and watching the great-grandkids bang around.

    Two new towns I did not see before. But I do see now. Mind’s eye. Places a story I’m pondering might need.

    Photos by Susan Palmer

  • The moon, there when you need it

    The day before the smoke from Eastern Oregon’s wildfires smudged the Eugene sky, I saw the moon in the morning, on the wane in its unglamerous phase between full and half, known as gibbous. That Latin word isn’t the one I’d have chosen. If I were the boss of English, it would be the belly moon, a friendly, funny, relaxed word, a word that invites you to settle in.

    I love the daytime moon almost as much as the nighttime one. When it was full last week, while we were camping, it was so bright you didn’t need a flashlight to find your way. It cast sharp, long shadows of the pines up around Waldo Lake. Night shadows and moonlight, what a pair.

    Today, hidden in our region by smoke from horrific wildfires, it’s officially this moon’s last quarter. Tomorrow it’ll be waning crescent. Knowing it’s there, always there whether I see it or not, is an anchor I hold onto regardless of what’s happening on the noisy, fraught and sometimes perilous ground.

    Photo by Susan Palmer