lake

February 6, 2020

Elk Christmas (Part 4)

Danielle put away the frozen food and turned on the baseboard heater. She read the nice card from the rental’s owners and the invitation to leave a little note in the guest journal. She perused the library and board game selections—all classics. As for the puzzles, there were enough to entertain a medium size penitentiary, and all of them Pacific Northwest-themed.

The kids just sat on the couch and stared at their mother until she showed them the bedroom they all would share, the one with bunk beds. They didn’t know what to make of bunk beds. They’d never seen one before. Finally, the girl climbed up one the ladders and pounced on the bed. She giggled and put her feet up, touched the ceiling with her shoes, and giggled again.

The cabin warmed up with the baseboard heater. A fire in the wood stove was out of the question. Even though the owner had built a perfect starter inside, and left precise directions how to open the flue, start and maintain the fire, and adjust the vents and fan, the act of starting a fire intimidated Danielle. She had never started one before, indoors or outdoors.

Danielle got a pizza going in the oven, poured a mug of rose, the kids cracked the cans of energy drinks and they all looked at each other. Rain had begun to fall with substantial volume so a beach walk was out. Maybe it would clear later. It was noon on the Oregon Coast and raining and a family was trapped inside a cabin without any possibility of escaping to popular media.

Of course! It was puzzle time!

Danielle set up a card table near a large window with a view to the yard and fairway. The boys set up chairs around the table. She told her daughter to pick out a puzzle. The daughter said there were too many to pick from. Danielle told her to grab one at random. The girl grabbed a dust-covered box and dropped it on the table. It was a 1000-piece puzzle of Crater Lake. A 1000 pieces! That would take months!

One of the boys asked what was Crater Lake. Danielle was dumbfounded, but then again, she’d never taken her children to Crater Lake. Disneyland was so much splashier! Then Danielle realized she’d never visited Crater Lake. What kind of Oregonian was she? What kind of Oregon parent am I?

Support Meditations Blog

The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.