Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Romance in it

    A January road trip to Canada! Fifteen hours of driving. I logged the first part of the trip, 480 miles yesterday from Eugene Oregon to Post Falls, Idaho. If you don’t know Post Falls, it’s not surprising. It’s a little town between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. It’s my usual stopping point on the way to Lethbridge Alberta, where my fabulous mother lives.

    I stop here because there’s a nice little Best Western hotel that charges less than $80 for a night’s stay in January. It’s tidy and not far off the freeway.

    I know this route well; last year I made the drive three times. It goes through amazing country, the lush Willamette Valley, the spectacular Columbia Gorge (yesterday, the Columbia River west of the town of Hood River was flat glass, a thing I have never seen before). Today will take me up through Idaho, skirting Lake Pend Oreille and through one of my favorite small towns, Bonners Ferry. Then up into British Columbia, over Crowsnest Past (that takes me over the Rocky Mountains and down onto the rolling southern Alberta plains). I’ve done this trip in brutal weather, but it’s mildly winter at the moment. Rainy in Oregon, scattered snow showers in Washington. Today the forecasters promise chilly partly sunny (16F) on my Canada leg.

    I’m thinking about American novelist John Steinbeck this morning, specifically his book “Travels with Charley,” not a novel but a travel memoir with his dog Charley. He has many fine things to say about a road trip but I like this observation best: “I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.”

    I took today’s picture at a rest stop along Interstate 5 just south of Portland. And I like to think that, inspired by Steinbeck, I will be able to spot the romance — stately trees, so beautiful — in unexpected places.

  • You do you

    I’ve always loved the Little Free Library practice, where people build cute waterproof wood boxes with a couple of shelves filled with books that neighbors can take from and/or add to. In our neighborhood there are many.

    But one neighbor chose a different option, stocking a cute little box with art, not books. It brightened our morning rainy stroll.

    Happy first Saturday in 2025. May you be inspired to “borrow, make and share art.”

  • Fueling imagination

    Catkins
    Snowberry
    Berry vines

    Some things that caught my eye on a rainy January walk on a trail that skirts the Coast Fork Willamette River at the Mount Pisgah Arboretum: Catkins on an unknown kind of tree. I know alders have them. Also hazelnuts. It’s hard to recognize trees without their leaves. Then, shrubby snowberry in front of a pine tree of some kind. I’ve heard that birds (thrushes, grosbeaks) eat the berries, but I’ve never seen this myself. Also, the bright red leaves of a snaking berry vine.

    I love the things that stand out on a dreary day. Outings fuel the imagination, which is a fine thing for reality to do. This old quonset hut, which I’ve passed many times, suggested itself on this walk as a setting in a story I’m mulling. The quonset hut itself made me think about things a character might do there, which then prompted an interaction among characters, which then tugged on the plot. Maybe all that will be something. Maybe it won’t. But it sends a great exciting creative tingle up the spine.