This issue’s advertiser focus is on Riverside Investment Realty’s Jean Johnson. The information below is based on my conversations with Jean and her written responses to questions.
Jean spent 10 years teaching public school in the Southwest’s Nava-Hopi and is versed in the “Beauty Way,” which she relates to the Beaumont-Wilshire neighborhood: “Walk down Klickitat Street or along the Fremont business strip, and you see beauty. You see pride of ownership, from the architecture to the condition of homes and businesses.” Jean maintains that like the Navajos and the Hopis, B-W neighborhood residents understand “that if we want to live in beauty, we have to keep things painted up, patched up, and raked up.” She concludes on a philosophical note, “And here’s the plum in the pudding: when the trappings of our homes are in order, it’s somehow easier for our hearts to live in beauty as well. Easier for us to pay it forward by seeing first what we can give, and letting the universe take care of what we get.”
Jean is a native Portlander, but during her Southwest sojourn she and her husband spent years hiking and rafting in the Grand Canyon. She recalls that Mother Nature proved her tough love time and again, whether it was during the last miles up the Grandview Trail or in a snowstorm or through Lava Falls with four paddlers in a superbly-made, but entirely dinky, Avon raft. Jean asserts that the lesson learned from these challenges is that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and I see that in the people who live in the Beaumont-Wilshire neighborhood as well.” The work ethic of the residents and resulting beauty of Beaumont-Wilshire are qualities that Jean holds dear: “People here have gone the extra mile during times when the universe seemed to ask more of them than they could give, and in so doing discovered that they are stronger and able to build lovelier lives for themselves and their families than they ever imagined.”
Accordingly, the byline Jean uses most often in her work as a real estate agent is “Expect Down-to-Earth Integrity.” This line arose not only out of her time with the tribes and in the Grand Canyon, but also from the four-season organic garden she grows at her home in the nearby Roseway neighborhood. From the curbside to the back, Jean plants greens year round; cares for fig, plum, and persimmon trees; gets the snow peas in each March; and braids up the garlic every June before the tomatoes go in for the summer. “It’s a beautiful thing to grow your own,” Jean says. “Work yes, both in the growing and washing of the greens, but hey, our gardens are great teachers!”