Michelle Godfrey is our resident wordsmith and PR spinster, dedicated to keeping Oregon top-of-mind for visitors across the U.S. Imported from Chicago in 2003, her residency is younger than some of Oregon’s nouveau-est pinot noir. But we don’t hold it against her. She discovered Oregon during a family trip in 1998, imagined what it would be like to live here, and five years later forged her own Oregon trail to settle here. Born in New York and raised in the Midwest, Michelle calls herself the iconic Oregon Dreamer. And that’s not just the starry look in her eyes. She's got big city ideas and a small town ethic, with a native Oregonian’s love of rivers, streams, coasts and mountains. She talks pretty, loves dogs, makes a wicked margarita, and laughs all the time. We think we’ll keep her.

Oregon’s Fine Cuisine Featured at Food Fete

January 30, 2007


Californians love Oregon. And we Oregonians are loving you back.

The romance was evident at San Francisco’s Food Fete last Monday, an invitation-only media event held in conjunction with the Fancy Food Show, which featured 80,000 new products exhibited by 1,100 vendors and attended by thousands of consumers, chefs, and foodies worldwide. The Fete, though, was limited to 62 journalists from such media outlets as the Wall Street Journal and Sunset magazine.

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The Gift of Snow and the Exaltation of Trees

November 28, 2006

It’s a dark 6:00am and it’s raining. I’m walking Shaman, my Collie, who’s picking up routine scents like a morning roll call. We come across the old Noble Fir on our path – it’s literally in the path of the sidewalk, which by mason’s design has been respectfully curved around its massive trunk. This tree is more than 150 years old, as old as Oregon itself. Shaman stops abrupt, a sesquicentennial of squirrel tracks and critter squats punctuating the scent. The rain on his back is now a smattering of snow flakes and I whistle him back to our walk.

The morning’s drive to Forest Grove, West of Portland, is awash in white. Raised a Midwestern urbanite, I like to think I know snow. I’ve driven through blizzards and shoveled once, twice, three times in a day. As a kid, I remember holing up in blanket caves during chilly power outages, making snow angels and castles out of four-foot drifts, and praying for snow days with plotting abandon. The temporality of snow was my prairie child’s wish, and my city girl’s chore.

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