Before getting far enough to see more than a hint of the profusion of color to come, we were greeted by a pair of mallards, resting close to the path and completely unafraid (probably because of the many children who feed them cracked corn, sold at the entrance).

There were a lot of other birds (I recognized a cormorant and many red winged blackbirds) but I’ll have to visit with S to get a more complete list.

The first flowers we really noticed were not rhododendrons, but instead subtle and intriguing hellebores.

Then, around another corner, it was clear that the rhododendrons really were “the thing,” and they were truly amazing.

Varied in color (we stopped once in front of a wall of blooms in at least 4 distinct shades of lavender), shape and size, the blooms, on bushes and even full-sized trees, were truly glorious.

Striking,

subtle,

complex,

and just plain lovely, they were everywhere we looked.

Some of the flowers aren’t blooming yet,

and there are clearly many  irises still to come

so a trip to the Rhododendron Garden is definitely something to try to fit into your busy schedule over the next few weeks.

The warm sun and bright sky (and the fact that we have been staying at a downtown hotel all week during some home renovations) drew us out for a walk after breakfast this morning.  I’ve wanted to show S the Eastbank Esplanade walk along the Willamette River for months now so we headed down to the river and across the Hawthorne Bridge.

It’s always cooler on the east side of the river and much nosier, too, as you make your way alongside and under the freeway.  Even the incessant roar of traffic couldn’t keep us from enjoying the sights along the way — from the natural

to the industrial.

I’m not sure if it’s good for the bridge, but all the rust on the Steel Bridge is remarkably photogenic.  This shot reminds me of a map.

The recipe also gave me an excuse to break out one of my collection of tart pans,

experiment with my new camera lens and play with creating some black and white images.

The tart turned out well even though I decided to make it at the last minute and had to rush a few things.

First, my butter was frozen.  Not a good place to start when the recipe called for butter at room temperature.  Ever resourceful, I searched for suggestions for quickly thawing butter and found this site.  I quickly cut the butter into thin strips and by the time I was done it was soft enough to begin making the crust.

My other shortcut did not work as well.  The recipe tells you to chill the prepared dough for at least an hour before rolling it out.  I decided that 30 minutes in the freezer would be enough. Probably not a good idea.  The dough was very soft and required a lot of patching to get it evenly in the pan.

In the end, it baked up satisfactorily, but there was some slumping and unevenness that I think I could have avoided with more time in the refrigerator.

Luckily, none of this mattered in the end.  The bittersweet chocolate filling (I used Scharffen Berger 70% cacao), sprinkled lightly with flakes of sea salt, is so rich and flavorful that the slumped and slightly irregular crust didn’t matter.

So, next time you have at least 2 hours before dinner, give this recipe a try.  Everyone will love you for it!

That made it all the more wonderful to wake up the next morning to blue skies and sun.  The weather was so remarkable that we quickly scrapped our plans to visit the Portland Art Museum (we’ll do that another day) and decided to head to the Columbia River Gorge (“the gorge” to people from around here) instead.

Our first stop, and oddly, the only one where I took any pictures, was the Vista House at Crown Point.

Even though the sun had been shining in Portland (really!) the skies above the gorge were grey.  Of course, it was still beautiful.

The rest of the day was equally lovely, with stops at Bridal Veil and Multnomah Falls on the way to Hood River.  Our Maine visitors were delighted to have been able to see a part of Oregon they had not seen before and we were happy to be with them as they saw it.

I also bought a pomegranate.

The persimmons were a gift.

The really striking thing about this tree, though, is not the bright yellow color of the leaves, but the brilliant green of the trunk and branches.

The green stands out even more now that the leaves have turned.

They were right, it rains a lot in Portland in the late fall and winter.  At the time, a lot of rain and consecutive overcast days didn’t seem like a bad trade for months of winter, bitter cold and many feet of snow.  After a full year I still feel that way.

Grey skies and the diffuse light they bring are also great for taking interesting pictures.

Wet pavements are too.

Despite that, my roses are still blooming (I took these pictures on Sunday, October 18th),

and there are even buds on some of the bushes.

At the same time, the leaves are turning on the trees in the yard.

So you can see why I am confused.

I’ve also been thinking about a post about the sudden, and in my opinion, untimely, demise of Gourmet magazine (we got our final issue this week — well, actually, we got our final two issues this week because somehow, in a fit of over-eagerness, we ended up with two subscriptions for the past six months and never canceled the second one because it was about to expire anyway).

But that’s not what this post is about either. In fact, it’s not really a post about anything in particular.

Let’s just call it a chance to post a few recent photos taken around the house on a rainy fall Sunday.

Now I feel better.

I feel lucky to live in a house surrounded by beautiful things.  Especially beautiful things that remind me of places I have been and people I love.

I remember these golden glasses from when I was a little girl growing up in St. Louis and listening to my parents talk about the year they spent in Mexico right after they were married.

This story, as I remember it, began in Iowa City where my parents were living at the time.  They boarded the train there, stopped in St. Louis to get married (never imagining that they would end up moving there only a few years later), and ended up, after 7 months in Mexico City, in what was at the time the small, off-the-beaten-path, mountain town, budding artists’ colony, of San Miguel de Allende.   I don’t know where my parents got these glasses, whether they bought them for themselves or received them as a gift, but they came home with them.

In 1973 my parents returned to San Miguel, this time in a VW bus loaded with three children, two manual typewriters, and everything our family needed for a year in Mexico.  During that year (I was in the 8th grade) I stopped sulking about leaving my friends in St. Louis and learned how to bargain with vegetable sellers in the open air market, how to make tortillas in front of the fireplace, and to love Mexico as much as my mother and father did.

I brought many things home from my year in Mexico; somehow these glasses from my parents’ first shared trip there hold the memories that matter.