I’m writing to you from my bedroom, and more specifically my dresser, which also doubles as my stand up desk.
We live here now. Again. We have unpacked about 2/3 of our belongings, and reclaimed our home through witchcraft. Our neighborhood is eerily quiet without the constant thrum and throng of tourism. I say, “Where is everyone?” at least once a day to myself or to whoever is in earshot. We ride our bikes and drive more than I would like. It turns out I actively hate cars. I always knew it, but a year spent living on a human scale, walking and traveling by boat and trains, really cemented the profundity of my aversion. Andy goes to work early and comes home late. He is shouldering the burden of earning the steady income while I figure my shit out— a role that he is handling with grace and for which I am extremely grateful. He says it feels good to be back in his studio. So there’s that.
So far today I’ve eaten a lunch of Trader Joes Samosas cooked in a toaster oven, made popcorn for some kids and sent them on their bikes to the pool, 1/2 applied for a job that sounds mildly intriguing and pays a pittance, cleaned out part of the attic, written some emails, made a phone call, gone to Fred Meyer to buy jam and school supplies, cleaned the kitty litter, de-linted a jacket I am trying to sell, had a conversation about middle school popularity with Cleo and her friend, wandered around moving plants and looking at the mole holes in our garden, cleaned out and organized Cleo’s desk, watered some plants and watched half an episode of the new season of Only Murders in the Building with Cleo— the one I fell asleep watching last night. I have very long to-do lists and yet I am moving around this place like a squirrel preparing for winter. I’m trying to shift the vibe of chaotic and scattered to more fluid and water-like. We’ll see how that goes.
Leaving and returning is an opportunity to view this place from more of an aerial perspective; with fresh eyes, disrupted patterns, more nuance, and a renewed appreciation for the mundane. I have a lotta love for this verdant, dysfunctional, breathtakingly beautiful, polluted, inhospitable, tragic, dynamic, lived-in conundrum of a place.
Summer in Portland is heat waves without air conditioning and working a series of increasingly random odd jobs. It is rising before the sun, feeding the cat, and stepping out into the quiet morning to carefully wend my way through the spider webs draped across the garden. It’s the smell of chlorine, cannonballs and the frenzied whistle of an overeager lifeguard who haunts the deep end of the pool at Peninsula Park. Summer is camping under big leaf maples festooned in layers of moss, their soft, hulking forms muppet-like and gentle. It’s swimming in lakes and rivers, and, when we’re lucky, the ocean. It’s bike rides to buy lime paletas at the 7-11 down the street and ice cream so rich and decadent it takes real determination to finish a single scoop. It’s the smell of sunscreen, and overripe fruit and trash cans left in the sun. Summer is late night meals with friends; mosquitoes biting and bats swooping overhead. It’s sleepovers and long, lingering coffee on the porch. Summer is the sound of people stumbling home from the Barlow Tavern, cars without mufflers slow rolling our sleepy street, and other people’s music blaring from cars, bikes and open windows. Summer is corn, tomatoes, peaches, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, zucchini, plums, string beans, nectarines, blueberries, pickling cucumbers and sometimes being too hot to want to eat anything. Summer is the tiny black dot in the middle of Queen Anne’s lace.
I spent last Sunday dragging boxes of my art supplies, abandoned in-progress projects and general ephemera that I’d stored in our attic back into the tiny room I’ve used as both my art studio (pre-pandemic) and office (pandemic). Piles of paper, boxes of fired and unglazed ceramics, bins of collage materials, paints, my fabric collection, sewing machine, and printmaking supplies all amounted to an inspiring and totally overwhelming mess.
As I reached peak chaos I detected the sounds of a crowd gathering in front of our house. Eager for an excuse to abandon the stuffy room and all my stuff, I raced downstairs, opening the the front door to a crowd of around 50 people on bikes gathered on the sidewalk and street. As it turns out, they were there to celebrate the spectacularly enormous Incense Cedar—a Portland heritage tree—that grows in the northeastern corner of our yard. A man with a booming voice and an air of horticultural scholarship was delivering a speech about this particular species of cedar (a “false”cedar) to the assembled group of helmeted tree enthusiasts when I joined in. “Peak Portland,” I murmured to my neighbor Nick, observing with amusement and appreciation as the lecture evolved into in a lively question and answer session.
The previous weekend I’d been out walking at dusk on one of my regular routes when I encountered a group of about 20 naked men and a few mostly naked women milling around their parked bikes on the periphery of the Adidas campus. They appeared to be getting psyched up for the World Naked Bike Ride, and event that I somehow seem to stumble upon every year, but one in which I have yet to partake. (There’s something about bike seats, crotch chafing and group revelry that fails to strike a chord of joy for me.) Anyway, I walked by the group trying to be as low key and straight-faced as possible, pretending that I was listening to my podcast and not staring, but I was definitely taking inventory of the variety of pubic hair situations in the group. You can imagine. Men of a certain age naked with bike helmets on — enough said.
Around 13? 15? years ago I was having a drink at Moloko on Mississippi St. when I heard the wild cacophony of a group outside. Captivated by the potential spectacle (it sounded joyous), I exited the bar and immediately came face to face with one of my former students…stark naked. He appeared to be having an incredible time until our eyes locked. Dear reader, I’ve blocked out what words we shared, but I can say without hesitation that it was such a specific kind of awkward that I still get a little uncomfortable just thinking about it. I stood completely still and did not move my head up or down until I was sure he was lost in the crowd.
My most surreal encounter with the naked bike riders occurred on a night seven or eight years ago. Andy and I were in the middle of a fight. It was past our bedtime but we were still under the incredibly mistaken impression that maintaining healthy communication requires never going to bed angry, even if your argument has no forseeable resolution. (Sidenote: Unsolicited relationship advice: Go to bed angry. In most cases everything will feel much better in the morning.) We decamped to the quiet dark of our porch, perched next to one another in silence, when out of the inky night hordes of fleshy, nude riders emerged. Thousands of naked people, bikes, boomboxes, sparkles, and festive headwear streamed in front of us for over an hour as we stared slack-jawed, wordlessly taking in the scene. At one point a fully naked man on a horse rode by. Once the last stragglers had passed, we each stood up and went to bed without having said a single word.
I’ve spent the summer informally teaching Cleo how to scavenge.
Lest you believe that I mean forage —though I do love foraging as well— I actually mean the kind of scavenging that one does in urban places: keeping an eye for discarded treasures laying akimbo on street corners and possible gems buried beneath broken down plastic rubble in free boxes throughout the city.
Historically I have been willing and able to climb into a dumpster to retrieve a treasure. We landscaped large swaths of the yard of our first home with discarded plants from the dumpsters at Fred Meyer before they started locking them. But I am softer and less limber now, and I know that there are plenty of other people whose needs are much greater and more urgent than ours. The dumpsters are no longer my domain.
I’ve always had a preference for other peoples’ discards. I prefer wearing hand-me-down clothing and buying my clothes used. I love wearing a piece of clothing that has already lived a previous life. When I was little the majority of my clothes filtered down to me via my closest-in-age male cousin. Although I often felt envious of my friends who shopped for new clothes at the mall —shoutout to Vallco Mall and Stanford Shopping Center!— I also kinda liked the time-worn soft fabrics and the imperfections of my clothes. I could really live in those clothes. And, because they were made for boys, they had pockets.
The same holds true for furniture. Apart from the furniture we’ve designed and made ourselves, our house is full of other people’s castoffs and pieces rescued from street corners up and down the West Coast. For years we’ve needed a dresser for one of the bedrooms in our house. I looked at Craigslist halfheartedly for a few weeks after we got home, hoping to find something amidst the sea of brown furniture that was free or almost free, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. Then one night Cleo and I were on a walk — actually she was skateboarding and I was dancewalking to music on my phone (surest way to make your adolescent child cringe with embarrassment)—when we happened upon a wood dresser with subtly painted floral motifs that someone had recently deposited on the curb. It was dirty and covered in stickers, but also fairly charming. I had Cleo sit with it while I jogged home to get Andy’s truck. We loaded it in, brought it home, removed the stickers, fixed a broken drawer, scrubbed it clean and now it’s living in our downstairs bedroom. Is it perfect? No. Is it what I would choose if I had unlimited resources? No. Is it fine? Definitely. And maybe that’s the goal. Good enough. Fine. Not perfect. In everything.
Sometimes, when I’m looking at Elle Decor or The World of Interiors or spending too much time scrolling on Instagram fantasizing about Studio Shamshiri decorated spaces, the haphazard collection of things in our home feels aesthetically confused and embarrassing. But, when I take a step back, and think deeply about what all that interior decoration, remodeling and aesthetic specificity actually entails on a resource level, I feel better. I remind myself to slide into a kind of negotiated detente with the constant wanting and desire for the new and the special that our culture teaches us. I like that we’ve given life to objects cast aside by others. I like the utility and the history.
While we were in Italy I was shocked by the lack of a circular economy. The amount of trash and waste was astonishing. The dearth of secondhand shops—there were a few church-run shops and extremely expensive vintage shops around—made consuming much more conspicuous. Plus, as far as I could tell, there was no culture of hand-me-downs, at least not one that I could discern. Each time we tried to pass along lightly worn items to friends’ kids, we stepped into a sort of cultural no man’s land, not knowing if we were committing offenses with our attempts to keep the items in use. While we were there I realized how much I rely on consignment stores, thrift stores, little free libraries and ubiquitous free piles in Portland to shop. Cleo and I made a pact that when we returned to Portland we would only buy used clothes, with exceptions made for undergarments.
That decision, along with underemployment (read, lack of expendable income), climate collapse and a reflexive disgust with the consumerist doom that permeates our culture, has led me back to a few of my favorite haunts: The Goodwill Outlet (“The Bins”), and the Grocery Outlet (“The Gross Out”).
There is a certain thrill in “picking” at The Bins. Standing patiently while the blue-vested employees wheel in the large blue bins, calling out, “Table, table, taaaaable!” and jostling for a spot at what you hope will be the choicest pile really gets my adrenaline pumping. The jumble of other peoples’ junk, a cacophony of textures, colors and materials, holds enough mystery and promise to keep me poised for infinite possibility. I am able to push aside the sensory overwhelm— the smell of Goodwill mixed with the faint whiff of abandonment— in order to maintain complete focus, ready to pounce when I see potential in front of me. We wear masks and gloves as we sink our hands and arms into the cluttered chasms, digging, sorting and plucking. Items are flung into the cart to be assessed and tossed back or kept. Occasionally a treasure is unearthed and immediately tucked under a wing and whisked away for safekeeping.
The sheer volume of stuff at The Bins is overwhelming and dispiriting, and the renewed popularity of vintage and thrift shopping means that the number of people jockeying for space in the warehouse has increased. Large groups of teenage boys picking for clothes makes the whole experience a bit more intense than it used to be, but all in all, I find myself being swept away in the hunt. It’s the promise of something you might find, that might be of use or perhaps even just beautiful. This week I discovered a folio of pristine Utamaro block prints, a Louise Nevelson monograph, french canning jars, a storage bin and a pair of Carhartts for Cleo. Not a bad haul.
As for the Grocery Outlet, well, let’s just say ours is full of hidden surprises if you are patient and thorough. Each one is franchised, so the selection varies wildly place to place. But find a good one and you are set. I equate going there to the experience of shopping with my mom at TJ Maxx or Marshalls when I was young. You walk the aisles carefully, making a thorough pass through it all, patiently surveying the retail landscape for a beautiful piece of fabric to peek out of the mass, or a Le Creuset pot marked down on clearance hidden underneath a bath mat. At the Gross Out the surprises are usually of the condiment, oil or frozen variety. If you don’t get a thrill out of finding a huge jar of almost-expired coconut oil for 6 bucks, it may not be your Shangri-la. But damn do I love that place.
At the root of all of this is a combination of thrift, a familial/genetic legacy of scarcity, and a love of shopping with challenges. Garage sales, flea markets, souks, estate sales, rummage sales, all of it appeals. I am not above consumption. I need to eat, and I appreciate beauty wherever I can find it. I am also acutely aware of the fragility of our world. I have no need for the new and the shiny. I’m ok with old and a little tattered if it means something won’t go to waste. I routinely put things on our street corner once they are no longer in use in our home, and delight when I see them snatched up. It truly gives me a thrill to know someone else might find utility in something that has been laying fallow in our attic or at the back of a drawer.
When I was in high school our environmental club brought in a speaker whose entire life’s purpose was creating no waste. He lived the life of an ascetic (though I didn’t know that word then) and eschewed consumption of every variety. I remember he brought in a jar of the trash he’d created over the course of a year. (One year, one jar of trash.) As he detailed his daily rituals, I had a stark realization that no matter what my politics, ideals or intent might be, I’d never be that disciplined or capable of living with such regimentation. It just wasn’t going to happen for me. I couldn’t articulate it then, but I now understand that there is no way I am going to shake the legacy of thousands of years of Jewish merchant-trading. Plus, I’ve got more than a touch of hedonism working against me. So, yeah, after the apocalypse my pack might be a little heavier than everyone else’s, but our makeshift home will be cozy.
Three scenes:
A family of 6 pushing through the sticks and scrub of the Washougal river. Each member of the group (except the father) decked out in life vests and floppy fishermen hats with obscenely cheerful prints. They stand at the edge of the water looking sheepish as the bare-chested patriarch slowly and methodically pumps up their floaties. They crumple and collapse into the water one by one, floaties encircling their waists, each one quietly succumbing to the water’s cool embrace.
A peach tree so heavy with fruit that its branches have given way. Soft flesh covered in a thick layer of fuzz that coats the tongue; still sweet and tender, orange and pink.
The collective detritus of two families intertwined for one week. Colored pencils scattered across a rug, piles of swimsuits, towels, goggles and snorkel masks heaped on the railings of a deck. Meals constantly prepared, eaten, cleared away and cleaned up. Pre-teens sneaking into the kitchen for handfuls of chips and cookies, stuffing the evidence in pockets and stealing out the back door. Sweetgrass growing on the path down to a steep gorge, roiling serpentine pools, brook trout hiding in the shadows.
And, that’s all for now. Crossing fingers that the rains come soon.
xo, Belle
Hot Links
Here’s a link to a mix I made this summer. Enjoy.
My media consumption has dipped considerably as the end of the summer draws nigh. I confess to not being able to focus for long enough to get into anything super juicy. It’s been all about easy, funny, weird, or best of all, a combination of all three.
If I’m being honest, I’ve been sneaking off to watch short snippets of Selling Sunset. I can only watch a few minutes at a time before I feel the creep of disgust, but I still love to hate it. I started watching it with my bff during the apocalyptic smoke week of 2020, when we were all stuck inside and the world around us was on fire. It was completely unhinged then, and it continues to be a visual representation of all that is wrong with pretty much everything. The real estate is aesthetically impoverished, the people are for the most part struggling to prove their redeemable humanity, and the outfits are off the charts bizarre. And I can’t look away. It’s terrible. Don’t watch it.
Deadloch: Ostensibly a show about a series of murders in small town Tasmania, the show is really a bonkers/hilarious deep examination of gender dynamics, indigeneity, and female friendship. Plus, the accents.
The book Big Swiss by Jen Beagin also took me on a totally bizarre journey of non-traditional friendships/sexual dynamics between women. I laughed out loud several times while reading it, though I would not describe it as a light read. Another fascinating character study of small town life—this time in upstate New York — including the social dynamics, eccentricities, dog parks, sex therapists and crumbling real estate. This one is weird, dark and funny.
I’m currently reading Hua Tsu’s memoir Stay True. Tsu grew up at the same time in the town next to where I grew up, and his recounting of the Bay Area in the 90’s feels nostalgic and familiar. I weirdly keep falling asleep every time I pick it up, so I’m making slow progress, but I’m enjoying it so far.
And, while I’ve got you thinking about scavenging, I always want everyone to watch Agnes Varda’s (RIP) documentary, The Gleaners and I, an incredible cinematic exploration of the history of gleaning. One of my favorite documentaries by one of the best film makers.
When’s the last time you saw Titanic? We watched it over the course of three days. For some reason Andy decided it was a must-watch, and he rarely gets a say in what we’re consuming, so we obliged him. In early 1998 my friend Cecilie convinced me to see it in the theater with her by telling me to pretend it was a silent film, and you know what, her advice still holds up! This movie is visually gorgeous, it still looks fantastic. And, it might be one of the most terribly written iconic pieces of pop culture we have. James Cameron should NEVER be allowed to write his own scripts. The man has the lyrical capacity of a 7th grader huffing glue.
I love your writing, I love the way that you have dipped me into your Portland world. Thank you for this gift and for the chuckle I had as I imagined you coming face to (face?) with a former naked student! Will listen to your playlist on my walk today, though no chance of any gleaning or treasure hunting here in Singapore.
So many reasons to love being invited into your space...... SLO has it's share of crazy revelry on two wheels, but presently a joyful 4 year old is balancing on two wheels propelling himself across campus. And of course, Jim particularly shares your passion for dragging home castoffs to be brought back to life in the studio.