A romanticized view of winter storms, but it's my view

Did you imagine yourself in The Long Winter with the Ingalls family?

And then when you grew up did you search
(ever so anachronistically, on the interwebs)
for a small coffee grinder, powered by hand,

the kind that Ma and the girls used for wheat --
the seed wheat for next year
 that became, painstakingly, flour
and then bread for the coldest days?

Did you imagine running a rope line to the barn for safety's sake?

In case a whiteout kept Pa from seeing the house?

 Did you read by gas lamp or firelight
and sigh with the thrill of the word:
blizzard
?

A snow day or two can bring that out in me.

The Suite family is busy with school this January.
Our last snowstorm is reduced
to these photos and the murky piles of ice
in mall parking lots.
The big yellow bus traverses our road twice a day again.
The horse trough no longer steams in a sigh of relative warmth.
But we still read by candlelight for fun.
Little House Seven Miles from Small Town
...that's us...

Look! Up in the sky!

Above the little hill that shields our farm from the wind I did see some blue sky this morning. I did.

I did not stay up all night finishing Lacuna. I did not. There was still an hour or so before sunrise.

I had to stay up to bake the bread or else put the dough in the refrigerator, which is not my favorite thing to do with that yummy yeasty goodness. (Click there should you want the rambling recipe of my favorite bread. (And/or some commentary on bubble letters.) Go on. You know you want to.)

A virtual dream trip from one who's staying put for a while

I was thinking how much I'd like for you to see a little bit about the Sylvia Beach Hotel at Nye Beach in Newport, Oregon. The inn's named after Sylvia Beach, a mentor of Lost Generation writers, who owned the famous Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. I have loved the hotel for years and think of it as my home away from home. In fact, if it is even your second visit there, the staff will check you in with a "welcome home" greeting.

It's on pilgrimage lists for folks who also can't wait to see the famous world's largest independent Powell's Books, just about two hours away in Portland, Oregon. The inn's also in some of those "101 things to do before you die" type of guides. Rooms are typically booked months if not a year in advance. I try to make my next couple of reservations as I'm leaving, ensuring that I'll squeeze in a retreat a few times a year. But there are also usually folks from all over the world who luck out with a walk-in after a cancellation.

Each room in the hotel is dedicated to an author, poet or playwright. From Austen to Wilde as it were.

I think I've stayed in nearly every room. Except Poe. It's a little on the creepy side for sleeping. The photo above is of Tennessee Williams' room... named appropriately "Stella." Dreamy, isn't it?

Shakespeare's headboard.

The writing desk in Shakespeare. As far as I know every room has a spot for writing. No phones or televisions though.

This is my daughters' favorite room. Dr. Seuss. Other children's writers represented at the hotel include Robert Louis Stevenson. His room was occupied on my last visit so I couldn't skulk in for a photo. It's gorgeous though ... a big four-poster bed of tree trunks twined with vines.

More Dr. Seuss. Maybe the least "restful" room in the hotel, it's also one of the most fun.

My favorite parts of the Sylvia Beach Hotel are the library and the dining room. The library occupies the western end of the third floor as well as the attic above, where chimneys from the other floors snake between bookcases like an illustration from Dr. Seuss. On foggy days the library is nearly silent even when writers and guests are sprawled in every easy chair. You may hear the scratch of a pen, the sigh of wonder at a truly great sentence read and re-read, or the crackling of the fire. On sunny days the Pacific view is astounding. The doors to the balcony are open and the background noise is the hush of incoming and outgoing tides.

The library has "no cell phone" signs posted among portraits of authors. Sometimes rowdy book groups or family reunions gather in the library, but that's a different and happier sort of noise altogether than the city-centric, twenty-first-century convention of cell phone addiction. (My tiny soapbox moment, brought to you by a decade in real estate.)

The library also has a small kitchenette for making tea and storing snacks. Every evening at 9 or 10 the hotel serves mulled wine in this area. It's so yummy and spicy and warm and it's gone in moments, usually to savvy guests who've been camped out waiting for the carafes to arrive. Not that I'd know anything about that.

One fantastic reason to miss the late-night mulled wine in the library is to still be seated in the Tables of Content restaurant in the basement dining room. Not only is the food local, gourmet and amazing, but it's served by "Mother," family style in at least five courses, and seating is carefully assigned so lone travelers and couples and groups are all accommodated.

And then... at dinner... love it or hate it, the diners play a game called "two truths and a lie." Each guest has the opportunity to tell two true things and one fib about themselves. Then the fellow diners ask three questions apiece of the storyteller to try to ascertain which is the lie. The hilarity of this game cannot be overstated, even for a natural introvert like me. I am always so inspired by peoples' creativity, and generosity, and friendliness.

Breakfast also occurs in the dining room, and is included with the room rate. It's a hot breakfast that I can easily linger over for a couple of hours, either visiting with a guest met the evening before or reading or watching the waves from the plate glass wall of ocean-facing windows.

It's easy to be alone at the Sylvia Beach Hotel. It's easy to be in a group or with your husband. It's easy to be quiet or sociable, to read or walk along the sand. The hotel's own website claims that the inn will either embrace or repel a person. (And to be truthful I have met a few people at breakfast who felt out of sorts with the Bohemian atmosphere and lack of modern amenities.)

I read that even today, Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris exchanges beds for a few hours' work from aspiring young writers. I do think the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon, lives up to its namesake's vision of celebrating the written word and the people who create it as well as those who crave it.

For the love of books ... and marshmallows

Sarah sewed her own bookbag with scraps from my fabric stash. Here's her pattern: Two squarish pieces measured about one inch bigger than her sketchbook. One long rectangle for the bottom and sides, double strength on the bottom. Two tripled skinny rectangles as loop handles that can go over her shoulder. She measured.

And then she got a little more confident and made an MP-3 pouch to coordinate with polka dotted grosgrain ribbon for the strap. (My favorite part of that is the big vintage button closure.) Reading and drawing and music and funky fabric combos. She must be my daughter.

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Right now Madeleine and Sarah are both reading The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. We're late to this party but it's so much fun. The book incorporates a lot of Greek mythology and we're just now entering the rise of the Roman empire in history class so there's some serendipitous school overlap. Plus I just love Greek mythology. See how easy it is to make me happy?

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And on that subject, I was in line at the grocery store this afternoon right behind a farmgirl I know from our rural village. While Madeleine and her oldest son talked about that very book my friend and I had a chance to catch up as well. Both of us, she with her four boys and me with my four girls, took guilty glances at our carts.

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The quick draw was on.

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(Now I know this woman to be a great mother. An accomplished vegetable gardener. Raises much of her own meat. Super involved with their boys' school and Scouting. In short, I admire her a lot.)

.

I took inventory of my cart. She waved a hand over the conveyor belt of goodies from her own cart.

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"The boys have had sore throats," she explained hurriedly over her (clearly not everyday purchase of) pudding cups and single-serve yogurts.

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"And we're going camping," I countered breathlessly about my (uncharacteristic haul of) cheddar dogs and marshmallows.

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What a funny world. As if I would ever judge her, or any other mom, based on the contents of her grocery cart. At least not until I took the Nutter Butters out of my own eye.

I might have mentioned a quilt block?

All 12, in fact, are now finished. Each block, and I'm not saying I counted or anything, has approximately (see, it's an estimate, and I'm stretching but still "counting" some of this as homeschool math) three bajillion tiny infuriating pieces.

Add to the mind bogglingly small triangles, squares, rectangles and trapezoids my terminal indecision about color and my fascination with every ELSE's color choices (like restaurant ordering envy, but much, much worse), not to mention my general, non-pregnancy-related aversion to the little quilter's helper called the iron, and you will have one hormonal (YES I'm blaming this on the baby; wouldn't YOU?) mess of a piece.

Oh! Oh! Oh! I musn't forget that throughout the quilting retreat I spent a lot of time with my camera. Not the usual method of finishing a quilt top in two days, you say? Well. This year's weekend was particularly poignant as there were several grandmother-granddaughter and mother-daughter pairs stitching side by side in a multigenerational display of loveliness and timeless pursuit of household beauty. I couldn't help myself with the camera.

So try not to look too closely at those points (be they fabric or philosophical), if you don't mind. It's hard to sew over 5.5 months of baby bump. For me. All righty then.

In other news:

My wonderful husband bought me a much-desired (drool might have been involved) book yesterday. Shocking, I know. Its title? Weekend Sewing by Heather Ross. The irony isn't lost on me either. Just let me have a moment with it.

Spoiled rotten... is it such a bad thing?

Last month I was pulling out of the grocery store parking lot when I had that moment. You know the one. The momentary midlife crisis that you're too young for but still recognize with every crows' foot. Maybe it's foreshadowing. But whatever it is at its evil root, it presented on that particular day in the form of a Honda Civic, gold package, cutting me off as I turned right into my lane.

She drove over the curb, people. She flashed me the special finger known in my house as "Tall Man" from the Thumbkin family. Also gracing that hand was a visible CZ from 35 miles per hour.

Her other hand was busy holding a bejeweled cell phone to her ear. I'm not sure but maybe she was steering with her knee? My shocked self took in her license plate frame as she zoomed away: "Spoiled Rotten Princess."

I drive a Suburban: Red, nine-passenger, flex-fuel-but-still-not-sexy, tows the horse trailer and hauls the feed and keeps my kids safe. My wedding ring took my husband saving an entire summer job's earnings between his sophomore and junior years at a public university. (That worked out okay for him, though, since I worked as a reporter to help pay tuition for the next three years.)

So spoiled rotten princesses may cut me off in traffic. They may assume my loaded Suburban defines me. (And in my neck of the granola, owning an SUV is enough to have you run out of greentown.)

Stereotyping goes both ways, I guess. She may have been a very late-for-court spoiled rotten princess. She may have been hurrying to deliver Costco goods to a relief plane for all I know. I shouldn't judge her by the self-spinning chrome hubcaps on her wheels any more than she should have judged me too slow to follow and too old to fight back in an alley.

I shouldn't judge.

But I'm at the Sylvia Beach Hotel for a four-day, three-night getaway because my family truly does spoil me... rotten.

I've spent the past couple of days writing, reading and drinking tea while the fog alternates with driving rain. Just perfect weather for a bookworm in the West Coast's best Luddite hotel: no phones, no television, no internet, no problem.

Yesterday I read Fortune's Rocks by Anita Shreve. Beautiful but a little disturbing; just the way I like Shreve. The day before, Northanger Abbey by of course Jane Austen. There's nothing like a little Jane on a rainy day. Today I'm sitting by the fire in the Newport Public Library, where they don't mind if you steal their wifi. Really. I asked. Because I'm not so spoiled as to fail to ask permission.

A Powell's pilgrimage

What could possess me to wake up at 4:45 on a foggy August morning? Further, to rouse five sleepy girls (mine plus one sleepover pal) just 15 minutes later? To bundle up for the still chilly air, to buckle into the Suburban fortified only with a cup of coffee in the pre-dawn moments? To drive three and a half hours on the Interstate? Oh, my. What could be worth that?

Downtown Portland is nice.

Waiting for the train with strange silent umbrella guy, equally nice.

Oh! Powell's famous independent bookstore. Covering one full city block on seven levels of near-heaven (I'll have to ask them if they designed that many levels purposefully) is tailor-made for a perfect day for a bibliophile and her bookworm brood. Totally worth the pilgrimage.

Madeleine stood mesmerized in the young adult mystery aisle and caressed the vintage Nancy Drew collection.

Laura happily read Eloise Wilkin as we walked and shopped. Literature and reference sections for Mommy. Curriculum for the school year. Maritime fiction for Daddy (who had to work but was with us in spirit). Forensics for the big girls. Oops. Gory. Let's move on from that to see if they have any age-appropriate references on crime solving. Well, of course they do! It's Powell's famous independent bookstore, the City of Books. So the girls chose some books that detail how to make and use fingerprint powder and how to tell (without a polygraph) whether a suspect is lying. That should make life in our little town interesting.

I visited my old stomping grounds in writing and literature but didn't dare take all five girls into my favorite haunt: the rare book room. You can peruse that ever-changing collection at Powell's online, but it's not the same as being there, breathing in the particular scent of centuries-old hand-decorated volumes nestled up next to signed copies of first edition Ursula LeGuin.

So in lieu of the rare book room we had lemonade and sandwiches in the coffee shop, which is not as funky or fun as it was in my pre-mommy days when my husband and I used to close down Powell's like some 20somethings close down bars. But it's probably cleaner. I'm alright with that tradeoff.

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Sarah kept a notebook close to her chest. What was she writing all day? A list of "strange" things she witnessed. The dog in a "wheelchair" to support its paralyzed back legs. The men with "inappropriate" piercings. The woman with no apparent disability in a designated seat on the train really offended Sarah's sensibilities. Green hair, blue hair, business suits and tall buildings that reflect everyone passing alike. Someone wrote on that window with a diamond. Someone didn't buss their plate. "City people are colorful," she concluded in her notebook. I just love the little editorial journalist in her.

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I successfully navigated city traffic in the Suburban -- so much different than in my Volkswagen! The kids played highway bingo and catalogued nine different state license plates. We stopped at the Northwest classic Burgerville for real ice cream shakes (none for me, thanks, Carb Police) and drove along the river through Oregon City and meandered back roads all the way home.

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We were back by dinner, bags full of books and hearts full of memories.

Sarah's Glasses (AGAIN), My Card Reader And A Book

This time we didn't even have to go anywhere to lose a small collection of important stuff.

We had a great hideaway hermit weekend at Farm Suite. Sarah made pints and pints of strawberry jam, Madeleine made yeasty, yummy egg bread and I made only the best pie crust to ever grace the Suite. (Just there? I almost took credit for the whole pie. But Madeleine peeled and cored and sliced the apples, so I would have been failing to properly attribute where it's due. Again.)

Speaking of AGAIN, Sarah's glasses are lost in the flotsam and jetsam of the weekend. I do believe we'll call this an unschooling day. The girls are deep in their books (Nancy Drew "Secret of the Lost Locket" and "Peter And the Starcatchers," a prequel to Peter Pan, written by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. Madeleine likes it very much, thank you.). Gracie is deep into her finger paints. I am deep into freaking out about my card reader.

We, and I do mean I, cleaned out my cubicle this weekend. You'd sorta have to see it to believe it. My office was originally a walk-in closet, or more likely a coat closet for the church back when folks bundled up for the wagon ride to Sunday services. The best thing I can say about it is: built-ins. It has massive bookcases and closets and cupboards which are duly crammed with fabric and papers and books and my cherished vintage typewriter collection. The rest of it is big enough for my vintage schoolteacher's desk and one cushy reading chair. Period.

The view out of my office window is lovely. I can see the B&B's red roof and their garden. I can, if I crank my neck around, see the chicken chalet off to the right. It's not the best view the house owns, but it's my view. And now I can spin around in my executive chair (hitting my knees on the desk drawer and then the reading chair) and see a much neater office behind the desk.

I spent the weekend organizing, deleting and re-organizing the office because, as things go around here, this closet-turned-cubicle is right off our dining room. And since the dining room is right off the front entrance, I'll let you take a wild guess behind which closed door we tend to do the dump-and-dash.

HOWEVER. I am now turning over a new leaf. My office is my sanctuary; it's the Mommy Zone. It's the place I take my time-outs when I've been naughty. (For a long time the girls took this literally. I crack myself up.) So if the office is all cleaned out (mostly), why-oh-why is my card reader missing?! I can't show you any of the sparkling jam photos. I can't show you Madeleine up to her elbows in dough. Sigh.

I hope the card reader turns up soon. And I hope Sarah's glasses aren't in a jar of jam. Oh, and the book I lost? I mean misplaced? It's "Why I'm Like This," by Cythia Kaplan. I feel awful about this since it's part of The Suburban Correspondent's book club. She finally mailed it to me, I'm halfway through it (very, very funny), and now it has vanished. I'll have to check the girls' bookshelves. Crikey.