Spindrift: What is it?

Some of you may know that I'm a library groupie. I love the library and probably would have my ashes interred there if someone would let me. I happen to have a librarian friend, which as a library groupie is pretty cool as we all know that librarians are perhaps the coolest hippest people on the planet, especially in relation to their entirely inaccurate "Shhhhh!" image in popular culture.

So when my librarian friend Deborah said, "I've got the library cottage for three days in May, do you want to come?" I immediately squealed my affirmation without even having any idea what the librarian's cottage was. What library groupie wouldn't?

The library cottage, as I learned from Deborah, is also known as Spindrift Cottage and it is in Manzanita, Oregon, right on the beach. Mary Frances Isom commissioned A.E. Doyle to build it in 1912 (the same year my grandmother was born.) A.E. Doyle is also the man who designed the gorgeous Central Library.
When Mary Francis Isom died, she left her cottage to the library employees. Not the Foundation, or the Board or the library proper, but its employees. And today, that's who gets to use it. If you are a half-time or more employee of the Multnomah County Library, you can enter a lottery to have a stay at Spindrift. Drawings are held three times per year and stays are short, to accommodate as many people as possible. The cottage sleeps twelve, has a kitchen, bathroom and an incredible view of the ocean, as you will see.
Matt and I had an incredible time at Spindrift and we are grateful to Deborah for inviting us.

If you want to read a short column that was in the Oregonian in April about Mary Frances Isom, you can go here or find it in the April 10, 2010 edition of the Oregonian. "Talented women opens Portland library to public, serves readers across Multnomah County" by John Terry.