Writing About Places

I really dislike Eugene. Personally I think the only thing it has going for it is the slickly-designed yellow “O” with the silver wings coming out the side. The epitome of sexy college boys, testosterone and football cleats. Go Ducks. What would we be without it? Even the geeks sport the flashy “O” adorned green and yellow gear, wearing it with pride, in between an intellectual drunken conversation over some trend-tastic locally-brewed beer. Sigh. I can’t use the word “hate,” because it wouldn’t be fair. In general, I loathe it. It’s so gray. It’s grayer than Portland.  I don’t like it here because I don’t want to be here. I want a career that’s enjoyable and challenging and that’s why I’m here- for the education. But I resent it. It’s a young person’s endeavor, and here I am, feeling old and jaded, uninterested in house parties and irritated by drunken antics. I’m the one that pounds on doors wearing slippers at 3 am because these f’in kids simply won’t shut the f*** up.

The older I get the more I despise the institution of education and its restrictions “Create the value of your education through papers and letter grades, prove to us what you’ve learned. Walk in our ugly brick buildings and eat at our fried-batter smelling campus bar ‘Rennies,’ that we fail to see for what it actually is, which is a place- that if not assigned nostalgia and fond memories of college-age ‘rage’ and sexual tension- would be a place with too little seating, unhappy bartenders and a centimeter of grease coated on top of all of its surfaces,” I imagine the powers to be unconsciously saying. So. There’s That.

Then there’s my favorite people. When I met them it was 1 am and I went outside to smoke. I couldn’t find my lighter and they lit my menthol.

I had this faraway memory in my head about Rita Gelman’s book “Tale of a Female Nomad,” where she finds her heart’s contentment in loving strangers and squashing the proverbial barriers between Americans and other countries’ people.

The three of them were an oasis for my weary spirit. I was just a bad grade away from having an excuse to run away from this pipe dream. I ached to know them. Their courage astounded me. Their language baffled me, and I longed to be as brave as them.

“Ash-lay!” They greet me as I walk into their house. The scene is per usual. Aziz on the couch with a mischievous look. Khaled standing there in his blue Abercrombie sweats, ironic in its symbol of Californian dreamin’ against his dark Kuwaiti skin. Fahad and Tariq sit in the middle of the room in front of the 50 inch Vizio TV playing FIFA on the PlayStation. Little cgi men run up and down the soccer field as the two Saudis give each other grief in broken English and Arabic, moving their bodies with the console’s controllers. I sit down and watch them play. A whistle from the teapot signals the tea water is percolated.

“We found this special milk, like what we have at home,” Khaled said as he prepared tea for all. He’s only 18 years old but he has the heart of a grown up. He’s a big brother and he often shows me the video of his little 2-year-old little sister Aliyah biting his cheek when he unsuspectingly offered it for a kiss. Neither of us tire of the video. You would be a bad person if you could tire of such innocent, absolutely endearing rebellion. A curly-headed chubby- cheeked live doll, biting her big brother’s cheek. That’s the essence of human love right there.
Khaled pulls out the evaporated milk from the fridge and pours it into the Arabic tea he brewed. “Estakana” is what they call it in Kuwait he says. All the boys drink the tea, and pass Pepperidge Farms assorted cookies. Ironic and charming I think, as they have no idea that in American culture men would never openly partake in tea and cookies with one another. No matter how many locally brewed beers they had consumed. Khaled makes everyone’s tea. It’s the big brother in him I think, always putting others’ needs before his own.

Eugene brings me these guys. They make it feel like home when I am homesick. They give me hope when I am lonely. As they sit and FaceTime or Skype their families in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, it puts things in perspective for me. They’re so brave. They’re so far away from home. I get uncomfortable because my loved ones are two hours away by car. And it makes me feel ridiculous.

Then there’s a time every evening after tea and FIFA, a few laughs an Arabic lesson, that I return home, one flight of stairs above them. I draw strength from their spirits, and rest easier than other nights.

Each day I wake up and the sky is gray. The gnarled fallen branches and debris from the aftermath of the snow and ice storm that hit Oregon twice in a few months seem to wave like evil fingers at me. The cloudy skies weigh heavily on my spirit. Their chronic presence makes anxiety rise in my chest and caps my cheerfulness to a fleeting thought, a wishful thought. Sometimes the sun tries to peek through the clouds and momentarily, hesitantly, I feel joy. Then a dense cloud floats in front of it like a cruel joke. I don’t even lift my head anymore. I have to look within for joy — using my imagination and my relationships with other people.

Khaled and Aziz, Fahad and Tariq are my home away from home. They are nothing like anyone I know, and it comforts me. Their kindness to me, their brotherly antics with one another, and their ability to be brave and live here so many thousands of miles from their comfort zone, gives me a feeling of security and a sense of home that is as strong as my real home. They are not my family but act as such anyway, and  I find them beautiful and rare. I find them precious and endearing. I draw strength from them.

Without Eugene, I wouldn’t have met these precious people. I see my future in them. When I’m with them I see  Khaled, a young boy learning English, making tea, missing his little sister. I see a 24 year-old man with a broken heart here to learn English and get his Master’s degree, but missing the one who married someone else. Doubting himself, but studying hard anyway. I see Tariq, half Hispanic and half Saudi, loving his life here, free of judgment so he can smoke pot and drink cervecas without the girls not wanting to date him. Without his family disapproving.

Fahad thinks about going home sometimes, since the girl he loves wants to divorce her husband and be with him. “But I’m confused Ashlay,” he says one night as we sit sipping tea. “But I try to love others. And I can’t.”

The reason my time in Eugene has been worth all the gray days, chronic anxiety, and snowy isolation  is because I learned how to go inside myself and search for the piece of me that could find the piece of this place I could love. These friends, these brave guys, these brothers.

My education here began when I read Rita Gelman’s book and dreamed of loving all kinds of humans and finding what makes us all innately the same in people that aren’t like me physically or culturally. It ended when I learned what I needed to. That I’m never alone. That my physical place cannot control my sanity unless I let it. That there’s a beautiful human spirit inside every unfamiliar face. That even this gray, half-witted cloud-capped city can be golden and glowing with humans.

Eugene is perfect for me. I couldn’t have learned any of this without the discomfort of this god-forsaken bore of a place.

I watch the boys fade in the rearview mirror on a sunny Saturday in March, marking the beginning of spring break. They have helped me pack and load the truck, and I’m finally leaving the place I hate. But I leave them here, and they will never understand how much they have comforted me, how much they have taught me. With their loves and their fears, their families and their Abercrombie sweats, their kindness and their large brown eyes. Eugene is the only place I could have studied them so. It’s the only place that could have brought us together, it’s the only place that forced me to look farther than the skyline for joy.

Gresham’s oppressive. But at least it knows it. There are so many strip clubs down W. Powell Blvd. I hate driving through that area. It means me feel addicted and oppressed just being there. In the middle of the day, black men and poor white men and women walk the streets. The go inside the bars or strip clubs. Or they push tattered  strollers to a bus stop in front of the dirty dilapidated building that is the corner convenience store, where they buy cigarettes and smoke while holding their children, or 24 ounce cans of malt liquor that they drink with the paper bag still around it as if we didn’t know.

If you continue down Powell you’ll find a more residential place, with two high schools on opposite ends to help  enforce a less oppressive vibration. On one side of 181st there’s a McDonald’s and a Walgreens. Kitty corner is a taco bell where the high school kids go when they skip class. In the same parking lot is a Dotty’ s – a place where addicted gamblers go to smoke indoors and spend welfare checks on lottery tickets and video poker.

I belong here because I skipped school with those kids, and smoked pot in those parking lots. Hung out with those kids whose parents didn’t care, and smoked cigarettes in my car before I was 18. I got sober in this neighborhood at the building that used to be the DMV. Hanging out with people who used to smoke indoors and drink cans of malt liquor. From the grit I rose, found the people I came to love who feel just as oppressed as I when we drive down Powell, to find the intersection that has the church where we hit a recovery meeting on a Wednesday night. Where we find hope, and coexist with the gray.

It’s my home. It Gresham. It’s yucky and wonderful and there’s so much poverty you just embrace it. Kick ass Mexican food and flea markets. The occasional nursing home and cul de sac.

It’s where I’m from. It’s where my life formed and then changed. It’s where I loved a lot of people. It’s home. Gritty hopeful home.

“Put your hand in the cold water there. What’s it feel like? Does it feel cold? ‘Yea. It does.’ When you put your hand in the water, do you hear any voices? ‘Well, No, they’re gone.”’ Schizophrenia, among other mental illnesses dictate the lives of many individuals who are in the criminal justice system.

—

            Joe Pishioneri, deputy sheriff at the Lane County Jail, has worked in law enforcement since 1986, lived in Springfield, Ore., since 1980, and done everything from civil service,  to everyday cop work, to running mental health services at the jail. Dealing with the overwhelming numbers of mentally ill inmates constitutes the jail’s biggest challenge. He describes one technique used on delusional inmates:

“When they can get back in touch with reality, the feeling of their own body, the cold of the water, they can start to see the voices aren’t real,” Pishioneri says. “You can’t agree with them to make them sit down, you have to tell them the truth.”

He walks into the coffee shop across the street from the jail, with a stainless steel travel mug in one hand and leather bound organizer in the other. His black wool button down coat goes to knees, and his salt and pepper hair matches a mustache nestled under his nose. He’s Italian, not more that 5 foot 8, but what he lacks in height he makes up for with his smile. It takes me back to the jail.

Joe met me in the lobby of the bland, concrete- framed facility in downtown Eugene. The home for almost 500 inmates, the dreary place was livened by Joe’s passion and pep. He stayed late that Wednesday night to give me a tour, making his 10-hour day into more like 12.

The mentally ill create the biggest hole for Pishioneri in his confidence in the system. A lot of homeless people he says, choose to be that way, or have opted for homeless because of addiction. But the severely mentally ill, the ones who have no business being on the streets he says … “those are the ones we need to help.” When Joe describes the system he includes education, law enforcement, and the institutions like hospitals and jails-government run facilities. I remember him standing proudly in a large room inside the jail, with a permanent half-smile on his face as he spoke. The room was full of computer monitors and had the feel of an office with a few cubicles and swivel chairs. He said this is where the jail will run its GED program. The funding wasallocated in the newest levy, allowing the jail to hire Lane Community College professors to help inmates earn their high school diploma or equivalent.

“The mentally ill are what we have to do something about,” he says. He tells of the way in which good men can become criminals without the right mental health care. The way that those who are mentally ill need help that they cannot find within themselves. The rest he says, can be helped via the correct funding for a county of this size, with programs to help educate and subsequently employ criminals, which Joe says makes them significantly less likely to offend. It’s the smaller percentage of those severely mentally ill, who are not employable, who Joe wants to help stay out of the cracks in the “system.”

Pishioneri always wanted to be a cop. It started when he was 8 years old, he says, walking home from school in Atwater, Calif., He and his friends Tommy and Eddy Mahoney bounced carelessly down the street with a girl from their class. When the Mahoney brothers veered to go home, Joe and the girl kept on.

Suddenly a driver in a brown Triumph turned the corner near them, pulled a gun on them and opened fire. The shooter missed Joe and his classmate, but yelled a racist slur at the young black girl, Joe’s classmate. Joe shoved her under the low-hanging boughs of a nearby tree and ducked in after her. When the gunfire stopped he ran around the tree and read the man’s license plates, which he wrote in the dirt with a stick.

“She ran off scared and crying, you know?” He chuckles before he tells me: “I went home and watched Gilligan’s Isle.” I laugh as well, singing  “A three hour tour,” and remind him of three-hour jail tour that was supposed to be two. He continues his story: When his mom got home from work he informed her. The police arrived to speak with him.

“You’re going to make a great cop someday son,” said the officer after hearing the way he instinctively protected the girl, and retained pertinent information including make and model of the car, its physical appearance, and its license plate number.

“That stuck with me.” There is fire in Joe’s eyes as he tells the story. He ran for Springfield City Council in 2004 and was elected. In 2008 he was re-elected unopposed. He gave up the position to run for state legislature in 2012, a position he lost by a slim margin.

Empathy drives him. The dead, he says, he has to disassociate with. The times he has encountered dead bodies have taught him to treat them as bodies only. The mentally ill he says, have the opposite affect on him. He talks about the way he wishes the entire system could work together to help the mentally ill get what they need and to.

Joe and I have different political affiliations. I am the exact same age as his daughter. I am Hispanic, and his heritage is Italian, He grew up a child of military man, and his parents remain married. We differ in age, gender and ethnicity. We differ in upbringing and life experience.

The same thread, though, strings through us both. That of humanity and empathy. Empathy for the empathetic. A love for people despite their inability to love. “I feel sad sometimes that I have things that they don’t. And they could have,” he says about inmates who he believes could have made a few different turns and had a life unencumbered by criminality.

Joe.

A guy with privilege.

A guy who made all the right moves.

I picture him pushing papers in an office inside the cold walls of LCJ. Going home to his wife, free to come and go as he pleases. As we rise to leave he takes my coffee and trashes it, commenting that it’s cold. I smile at hispresumptuousness, which I forgive as an endearing fatherly trait. I walk outside with him where damp Northwest air touches our faces. We say our goodbyes and I watch him walk back toward his place of privilege in the building where for the inmates, privilege is almost nonexistent.  The place that offers freedom and financial security for Joe is also a place where, for nearly 500 people, freedom is just an abstract idea.

LANE COUNTY JAIL

I imagine a reality that’s so close I can reach out and touch it. From this  path I’m on, into the ditch that is a past, a preface of a sad story that I closed the book on. It starts when we walk in. I realize that the same architect must design all county jails, or they must at least borrow from one uninspired original. Lane county jail is like the others: slate gray cinder block, bullet-proof glass, and clanging metal. While we wait for our tour guide I reminisce. I don’t mean to. I cannot help but remember my own experience of being inside a jail cell on someone else’s terms. The smells here are pungent, like a bit of cleaner, with the thick blanket of people and their flesh.

I remember my fears and my shame, the mountain of self- loathing and self- doubt I had to lift off in order to rise out of bed during those days of my life. A time in which continuing on the path would have meant conceding to defeat and surrender, to let the darkness envelop my light.

The strength I needed to break through the cobwebs and keep their fibrous threads from suffocating ever facet of my existence was strength I didn’t possess alone. Believing I could pull out of it took all the doubt I had. When I couldn’t set my doubt aside, I looked to others, to those who knew me, loved me and believed in me, who had come from where I came from. Live people in a realm of demons whose whisperings almost took me to the grave.

Where did it come from? That feeling that I was never good enough? That feeling that other people did cool things — great things with their lives, and I was always one step away.

I didn’t belong in jail, but alcohol took me there, both physically and mentally, although it always masked itself as conviviality and escape, a soft buffer from doldrums. When I got there my demons would nod in unison, confirming the stories I told myself about how I’d never quite be right.

Jail: a single place holding a million feelings of self-doubt and defeat, a symbol of self- sabotage and failure.

It’s so surreal and beautiful now to be here as a visitor- those gray days long behind me. All around here the heavy pall of addiction shadows the faces of weathered men and burdens the souls of tired women. Blue government-issued garments hang loosely from their bodies, white letters and numbers stenciled on backs.

There are few bras to be found. I would guess if she’s lucky enough to earn or buy one, she’s likely been here longer than she’d care to think about. There’s an over-sized man shaking questionable ingredients inside a Fritos bag in the men’s dorm, another one who’s been here long enough to learn tricks others will never care to know.

I remember the longing I had to smell something. Something good. There were almost no smells in my cell. Almost an absence of smell. It was cold and lifeless. Sometimes a waft of skin cells and cotton t-shirts would meet my nostrils. When meals came there would be smells you couldn’t enjoy. A hard-boiled egg or the sucrose of a powdered juice mix.

I would grasp at my jail issued T-shirt and sniff. I hoped to smell soap or cleanliness, or even an odor of bodies. The absence of stimulation put a hole in my psyche that I’ll never forget. At night I’d close my eyes and try to remember the way my favorite perfume smelled, and the way the lights strung around the trees in my backyard twinkled.

Oppression of spirit and imagination lives in the porous cement. It’s not a place where dreams are born. Those need room and sunlight to grow and there isn’t any of that here. Death has a presence, death of illusions of grandeur and superiority. Death of invincibility, and the high of rebellion. Death of childlike innocence, and the dawning of darkness, dim as it rises, the birth of reality, as ugly as it is.

But there’s hope here too. It’s hope that only desperation can manifest, a realization of reality, a confrontation of darkness, a shiver that an enveloping reality evokes. Empathy overwhelms me, and I’m struck by a deep gratitude for having been rescued from the same well you’ve watched others die in. The guys sit around tables and laugh and joke together. They seem to be carefree in this moment. Maybe this place relieves the burden of their lives — paying bills, checking in with probation officers and trying to choose between paying fines to the courts or putting food on their table. In here their life is not their own, but maybe that allows them to sleep better. They play cards and the stakes are low, a few items from commissary, or maybe an extra pillow for their twin-sized bunks. Maybe here they get a break from an addiction. Maybe here they can clear their minds. Maybe here a light at the end of the tunnel is lit so they can finally see a way out.

I look into the fishbowl at the men who can’t see my penetrating gaze. One sits alone, hunched over a folded piece of white paper, etching the words “Happy Valentine’s Day,” in bubble letter onto his handmade card with a pencil.

His orange plastic sandals swing to and fro under the aluminum bench he sits on. Like a child’s poem read on a rainy day, or a kind word from a stranger, his valentine card opens the door to reveal his humanity.

Yes, there’s hope here, however deep inside one must look to find it, it’s inside these people. No cement walls or pallid pigments can keep their hearts from aching, their spirit from yearning.

I remember sitting at a similar table, wearing similar issued clothing. I wonder if they people looked at me too, and didn’t understand, if they judged my whole life, if they saw the bottom of my well, or if they pictured the sunshine evaporating the water that could drown me.

It’s just a place. It looks so simple. Maybe that’s because the people here are so complex. When the door shuts behind me and I breath the damp night air, I’m free. I realize I always want to stay that way. But I also miss the ones inside. Maybe I’m wrong but I think they’re just like me. A part of me is the same as them. Every day that I act differently than the gray days, I stay on the path, one slip away from the ditch.

She’s an Anna Sciarra type. Not the one on the red carpet; the one in the movie “What Dreams May Come.” Her skin is milky-white. Her eyes are a dark brown. A muted shade, not a vibrant one. She rarely lets herself get too excited, save for the quiet pleasure she gets from a moth-eaten  page that’s home to a sentence that evokes happiness or sorrow in her, both she finds equally delicious and critical to her soul.

A bit solemn and morbidly creative, the Sciarra girl revels in a quiet glare that softens into a smile. Her mind is a cavernous place where parakeet-yellow dandelions grow against tall stone walls. A blue bird rests on the great stuff ledge, basking in the sun as the clouds move thoughtlessly through the warm rays. The sun yawns, having worked so hard, and closes its heavy lids. The dandelion rests against its concrete home.

She’s serious, but playful, and cherishes her father’s wisdom. He wears a hat from England with a small brim and wants for her what he doesn’t have himself.

Lawrence Hall has narrow crevices and tall gray walls. A concrete-framed hallway gives way to billowy paper lanterns that dangle from clothespins and string. Funny, you think. A bit of laughter in a studious place, the banter of a child in a meeting for grown ups.

The whole place is like this. Creatively serious people drink gray tea out of mason jars and hunch over intricate sketches for innovative and efficient pieces of architecture. You can almost see their big yellow ideas bursting out of their life-ceilinged office, like in a cupboard in an attic, they crutch and scribble, their thoughts seeping through the cracks in the doors. A small yellow lamp atop a short desk, a wooden chair atop a cold slate floor.

Then there is the warmth of the honey-colored wood and the windows trimmed in white, as a warm spot in her brain. A place you can spread out and take your writer coat off. The espresso illuminates your spirit, but the gray light from the sky pours in to  cool color of cocoa bean infused froth. The coolness of a newspaper meets the warmth of a golden hand. A group gathers to warm themselves and socialize.

Quiet but creative. Solemn but beautiful, happy, yet subdued. The Sciarra girl hasn’t found him yet. But he awaits her on the other side of the wall. He picks the lone flower, and fights his loneliness by gazing at the blue bird. What does he see he wonders. Is she there? A tainted love, a deep wound, a ray of warmth from a small lamp, a chill from a stony breeze.

It’s her. It’s here. It’s this place. This dichotomy of warm and cold. The overflow of ideas, and the compression of a surge. A wet towel wiping sunshine yellow drips down a splintered wooden brush.

Lawrence Hall. Her.

A suped-up SUV with silver rims sits in the alley alongside the brick building at 628 Blair St., its backdrop a mural on the side of the building. It’s a green and red rendition of Mexico, peeling and a bit dirty, revealing a brick canvas beneath. The vehicle sceams “American Dream,” in an alleyway where the environment is anything but a representation of success. A place where one could dream to escape is more accurate. A dilapated fence lines the other side of the alley, grounded into the earth with insecurites, guarding hopeful dreams, weeded front yards and brown puddles of rain water. The mural matches the aesthetic of the alley where where break-ins are a normalcy and a transient rummages through the dumpster.

The stench of blood and dirt mingles with the blaring of mariaci from above.

The door swings open with a creak and slams with the sound of tinkling bells.

The meat case is almost as long as the store, which isn’t too large — the size of a small ranch-style house, with the butcher shop, patisserie, grocery and produce all in one. Above, tissue-papered tails of puppies and donkeys orange and yellow dangle — piñatas that evoke a memory of summer birthday parties in second grade when blind-folded in the sunshine, hoping to catch a good swing and burst the papier mâche donkey open, divulging  its sugary gems. Beneath them lie silver racks adorned with Mexican candies. Mangoes dipped in chili powder and shaped like half-moons live placidly in clear cellophane wrappers, hanging enticingly from silver hooks. Happy illustrations of brown-faced wide-eyed niños and niñas adorn brightly-colored packages of candy. Inanimate objects like limes and chilies are painted with smiles and cartoon eyes next to the words”Limonoza” or “Gansito” snack cakes.

Behind the meat case there is a young, mustached man stripping the carcass of a dead animal. He nods and continues his work, the sound of his knife meeting the plastic of the cutting board beneath the muscle and bones of the venison. The glowing glass he stands behind is full of meat and cheese, a benign symbol of the of Strips identical to American string cheese lay in sinewy heaps next to chunks of “queso fresco,” and “cotija,” yellow and white Hispanic cheeses. The meat is a medley of novelty animal parts. Thick cow tongues lay in neat pink rows next to a few aluminum pans full of “chiccarrónes,” sprinkled with spiced seasonings basking under heat lamps.

On the left before the meat and cheese, there is a tall glass case full of pan dulce. Yellow and white pastries are drizzled with pink sugary glaze atop crests of corn-meal based pastries. Squares and circles, frosted and plain, starchy desserts glow in their glassy treaure chest.

The produce section is being tended by a kind-faced woman in an apron arranging pyramids of mangoes and limes. Her skin is a deep honey hue and her smile evokes images of pink carnations and iconic brands that use Hispanic ladies to sell their fruit or sugar. She circles over to cilantro bundles after catching a falling white onion and looks up with a smile. Her apron is black and is embroidered with the words “Mi Tierra,” across the chest. Her hat is a mirror image, framing her brown eyes and pink cheeks.

The Salgado family, from Michocán México, have owned the a Taqueria and supermercado since 2009. Their eldest sister Anjelica manages the operation.

“We already owned a Carniceria in Mexico so this one feels just like at home,” Salgado said. The family of 10 all live in Eugene and work at Mi Tierra. Today, Salgado says, a few uncles and brothers are hunting. They take turns she says, as at least one male stays behind to work in the butcher shop, a trade the men in her family learned from her father.

Anjelica’s round belly and wide smile radiates her maternal glow. It is her third child, she reveals as she caresses the bump beneath her Mi Tierra apron. In the Taqueria hangs a “Best of Eugene” plaque bestowed on the business by the local paper “Eugene Weekly” in 2011. A proud Salgado family stand in tiers for the picture, the men in the back and the ladies in the forefront.

“When here, you’re family,” says Salgado, with an embrace as sincere as her environment. Black papier-mâched eyes follow patrons through the market and wafts of limes, pinto beans and jalopenoed carrots carry outside to the chilly Eugene air.

A world apart, yet within.

A little México.

Nikki has a kind face. It’s sweet and little with smallish features and berry-colored lips. She is petite – the perfect build for a horseback rider I think.

The grays all blend together in a muddy gravel aesthetic. The sky looms cloudy with a deep black lining their dreary billows. Large chunks of gravel pave our way from the muddy drive to the large barn-shaped building ahead- the Oregon Horse Center.

Nikki leads us indoors where an almost empty arena lies trodden and inviting before us. A gentleman sits atop a carriage-like seater drawn by four miniature ponies. They circle the arena, prepping the deep, airy soil for its next rider. Cuter than a Zamboni, but just as productive I think.

A tin- colored sky paints the background for  a frosty chill that bites like cold metal. We exit the open air arena and make our way outside to the boarding stables. The air is moist and tiny drops of rain dot cheeks and make eyelashes appear as dewy spiderwebs.

An open field greets us, marshy and yellow-green, laden with tall grass. After a long walk a pond greets us, one where the horses can drink, and the cows as well. Shaggy brown bangs hide placid staring eyes to our left. Behind a fence made of dense logs and criss-crossed planks stand a few stoic steer. I snap photos of them as they gaze seemingly unamused at my cooings.

The dryness of the boarding stable greets the lot of us, along with the smell of leather and hay. The sound of a horse winnying echoes down the breezeway even if only in my mind’s ear.

Caramel-colored faces and happy snouts protrude from individual stables. “Don’t pet that one,” Nikki says, “he bites.” The feisty biter on our left looks innocent enough, with his big brown eyes and the hint of a smirk across his lips. His coarse cream-colored tuft along his head is cut short, imitating a mo-hawk.  I like him.

Tall and dark, towards the end of the stable, a cocoa-colored horse greets his master with a nuzzle and a head nod. Torque, we learn, is Nikki’s horse, at a new home here in Eugene, far from his home in small-town farm country in California.

A kindness boils in his eyes, a shiny glare reflecting off the glassiness of the gray around us.

Chilly sweet smelling is air heated by the warmth of the large majestic animals inside wooden walls. A gravely path leads back  to a contrasting motor powered “torque,” we retreat to civilization once again.

A longing inside me wishes to stay and chat. I want to tell all the horses my secrets and let me rest my head on their side. I can feel warm hide permeating the crisp cold habitating the long strands atop my head. The rise and fall of his breathing soothes the erratic heart beat inside my chest, and I’m at home- even as I see the Oregon Horse Center grow smallish like a dot in my rear-view mirror.

I open the pink door and walk up the two flights of stairs where fro yo mania ensues. Upwards of ten flavors to choose from, each neatly labeled on their chromed machines, levers turned up, their purposeful design awaiting a flick of a wrist. I swipe a pink cardboard cup splattered with white words that read “Yogurt Extreme”- A playful design for my hollowed canvas.

Cheescake, cake batter, salted caramel pretzel. I pull the lever and watch the cold creamy dessert slide into my bowl, one flavor after another. If it sounds good, I slosh it in. I skip the fruity pebbles today and side step down the toppings bar, scanning for peanut butter chocolate goodness. Oreo crumbles and cookie dough chunks make little dents and dashes in my pint-sized freezing yogurt mountain. I dust the crest with coconut flakes, and stick a pink plastic spoon in the top, like a conquistador claiming their land.

I spoon the first bite onto my expectant taste buds. Caramel-salted chill hits my palette and is met with a melting coconut flake. I swirl the flavors in my mouth and when I’m done savoring their debut I let them refrigerate my belly. I feel where the crest of the frozen mountain landed, a cold burn marking it’s place in my middle.

I lose sight of my concave utensil and come up with an Oreo piece, like a chocolatey rock on a snowy alpine. It crunches in my mouth, slightly soggy from its melting vanilla-y base. The gritty crumbs give way to a dark chocolate semi-sweet taste that bites through the soft vanilla aftertaste of the cake batter swirl.

The next bite is a topping-free frozen yogurt solo. The tangy cheesecake pungency is mellowed by the sweet cakey flavor, met with a warm caramel drift and a sprinkling of salt – a taste that activates the flavors all at once. I can only concentrate on one flavor at a time until they meld together into one sweet and salty bouquet of piquancy. I roll them around in my mouth: scoop after melting scoop. I bite into a salted doughy chocolate chunk, and relish it’s texture against its frigid velvety backdrop.

I scrape the bottom of my cardboard oasis and come up with a tidbit of coconut flake swimming alongside an Oreo crumb in a pool of sacchariferous liquid. I consume the last of it, the hodgepodge of  sweetness already becoming a thing of the past.

I remove the pink plastic spoon from my contented lips. The last of the melted yogurt beads up on the shiny pink utensil, like a snow cap melting in spring

I thank it for its purposeful existence and walk down the two flights of stairs and out the pink door, my candy-coated tongue resting contently inside it’s sugary cavernous home.

Perfumania. It brings me way back. It’s a medley of bubblegum gardenia with dashes and spritzes of that signature cool spice of your last boyfriend’ s cologne. and a sweet and sour tang of Incanto Charms.

In my mind’s eye I go back to Clackamas Town Center, where I worked for years. The Perfumania store is a place where all the fragrance companies I worked for and all the memories I made with each line of fragrance come together piecemeal.

I ask her if I can smell the Hanae Mori. I feel as if I’m a heavy object floating in this space. The smells all around me tell me I’m close to smelling a specific one, having a specific memory. My nose searches for something definitive.

I ask the sales associate to spray Hanae Mori  for me. I put the sprayed paper under my nose and it takes me immediately to Hawaii. I had just bought the scent and then my family and I went to Hawaii on a trip. The first time I sprayed it I had just gotten out if the shower at the hotel. I threw on some cotton shorts and a white tank top. My hair was long and wet, and I misted the Hanae Mori across my chest. Tonka bean and it’s rich warm vanilla essence,  gardenia and sweet peony. The white floral drops softly into a warm vanilla wood base and dries on the skin with a candy finish. It rises from the heat emanating from my chest from my hot shower.

Now, every time I smell that I think of only that day, that hotel, Hawaii. I close my eyes and I’m gone.

I open them and remove the strip of paper spritzed in Hanae Mori from under my nose. I’m inundated with the hodgepodge of scents in the store. My head starts to ache. I reach for the little container of coffee beans, and sniff them. Stale – but strong enough to clear my nose a bit. All around me there are women. Some are young, some older than I. Each spray and wave their strip of perfumed paper under and around their nose. A bubble smelling scent rises form a little girls zebra printed perfume bottle. An overpowering floral from her middle aged mother. They mix in my nostrils and make burn my septum.

A place where femininity spills over and seeps out the edges, elegance absence. Ever color on a glass shelf, each bottle a little more innovative than the next. I look out into the food court and as I near the exit I smell the food court. A fried tortilla image takes shape in my mind promoting by the waft from the Taco Time. I look up and see the Sbarro sign. The smell of tomato sauce forms a bowl of pasta in my mind’s eye. Perfumania is right next to the Food Court. Eugene. Valley River Center.

I walk in and can’t feel anything but stimulated. There’s a ding at the door to announce my presence and warm light makes this glittery home goods and furnishing store feel cozy. The floor tiles are red, like at every Pier 1 Imports, a trademark of the store, like the employees in their blue aprons with Pier 1 embroidered in white across the chest. I work here seasonally, but although it is my workplace for the time being, it doesn’t have any stress attached to its existence. Probably because the people are pleasant and my boss, Andee is a 60-year-old curly-haired joy who asks customers to stay a while because: “We’re pretty and we smell good.” That is true indeed. Each aisle boasts shelf after shelf, cranny after cranny of bold-colored candles, giraffe shaped glass figurines, or Christmas ornaments from across the world. Yellows, oranges, silvers and golds greet the eye and no matter how long you are here, you will not likely not see everything in the store. The store has an air of organized chaos and festivities galore. What with glitter from sparkly Christmas ornaments adorning the red tile beneath your feet, hand blown glass ornaments dangling from shiny hooks, decorative Italian bowls swirled with rich colors its a little colorful circus, complete with zebra mugs and elephant sculptures. Most people don’t leave empty-handed, and its easy to see why.

There are place settings fit for kings and queens set on cherry hardwood tables, complete with golden charger plates, golden napkin holders, billowy red napkins and wide, balloony red wine glasses. You can just see it in your mind’s eye, full of Cabernet or Pinot like the Red Sea, intense and deep. To the left there are a few plush couches, each one  set up as its own faux living area. There are chenille throws draped across the cozy-sitters and multicolored pillows cover its seats. If you look hard enough you may find a man waiting for his wife, tucked between an embroidered Indonesian pillow and a mosaic end-table with a plexi-glass sign holder fitted with a red sign that reads “sale $70.” There are two walls in the shape of an “L” that help shape the faux living room setups.  floor to ceiling pillows cascading across the shelves in a rainbow of turquoise, silver, yellow, red, purple, magenta. Organzing the pillows is my favorite part  of my job. I have to get a ladder and squish the pillows tint place and re- place the ones on the comfy couches. When I’m done it look sleek a masterpiece of cotton and polyester, inviting you to lay, enticing you to dream of  colorful cloud-jumping.

Its a place you don’t want to leave once you arrive. Its full of joy, and people are shopping the after-Christmas sale. Its a place where those with an emotional holiday hangover can come to rejuvenate their senses. A place where everything is pretty — and it smells good.