“Do Something Challenging”: Paintbrush Harvest
“My sketchbook visits to our local farms orchards and vineyards began during the 2010 harvest season. I followed men and women up and down along the rows of vegetables, berries and flowers quickly sketching their bending and stretching repetitious motions as they gathered the harvest into boxes and buckets,” local artist Betty LaDuKe said. The theme of sowing, farming, and harvesting food had always compelled her. In her home studio, she converted her field sketches to acrylic paintings on large cutout panels of plywood. When she finished a panel, LaDuke would load it into her Subaru wagon and return to the fields. “I enjoy bringing the panels back to show the workers how I’ve interpreted them,” she said. . .
Winter Produce, Box-by-Box
We are so lucky. From early spring to late fall, the Rogue Valley Growers Market puts organic, locally-grown produce at our fingertips. In winter, the gears change. For Tony and me and other neighbors who have bought shares in the Barking Moon Farm Winter CSA program, the harvest—now entirely cold weather and root crops—arrives every two weeks in a large plastic box with our name on it. The boxes are stacked at the end of the driveway next to a small house a mile from ours. The system is simple: You identify your box, transfer the takings into the canvas bags you (should) have brought, and return your box to the “emptied” stack. . .
“Next Door” Neighbors
In 2000, the social scientist Robert Putnam chronicled America’s declining social capital in his landmark book, Bowling Alone.Today, it seems we have slid from solo bowling to tribalism. My move to Ashland included a large wish for the opposite. I imagined an expanding circle of nearby friends, built upon differences as much as shared interests, chance encounters, kindness, and humor. One of the first things I did after moving here, though, wasn’t quite face-to-face: I joined the local chapter of “Nextdoor.com,” the largest private online network connecting neighbors in the country. . .
Medicinal Potions: Lithium Water and Cannabidiol
In the early 1900s, throngs of tourists would detrain at the Southern Pacific Railroad station in Ashland with bathing suits tucked in their bags. A 1915 Southern Pacific Railroad flyer heralded Ashland as a resort city on the “Shasta Route,” midway between Portland and San Francisco, noted for three things: beautiful environment, matchless climate, and wonderful mineral springs.” Ir was the lithium-laced mineral springs that most drew these tourists to Southern Oregon. A century later, Ashland has become a mecca for CBD oil, today’s medicinal potion. . .
Praying for Winter Storms
Winter storms on the West Coast pack good with bad. In Oregon, where two years of insufficient rain have emptied reservoirs and fueled wildfires, we entered this winter praying for weather: rain in the valleys and heavy snow in the mountains with its promise of spring and summer melt. November, December, and January—typically the wettest months here contributing nine of the annual 20-inch rain total—failed to deliver. The storm we’d been waiting for arrived the day Tony and I were to drive to Portland for my cornea transplant surgery. As we began the sinuous drive through the Siskiyou Mountains, filled with toppled trailer trucks. . .
The Vision Thing: A Winter Trip to Portland
“I think you put too much contrast in my eye,” I told my eye surgeon at the one-week post-op visit following my first corneal transplant. Tony and I had driven that morning, again, from Ashland to Portland, where the surgeon, Dr. Mark Terry, weaves his magic. The night before, the air bubble that had been holding my transplanted cornea in place had started to dissolve, revealing a world of color and contrast I had forgotten. . .
Sheep Seasons
“It was love at first sight,” Ashland sheep farmer Kent Erskine told me as we watched two ewes and their ten-day old lambs frolic in his pasture. “I liked the way they go about life—they don’t have an attitude, they just do what they do and they do it well. They don’t give a damn what we think.” In the urban Northeast, I’d never given much thought to sheep. When I arrived in Southern Oregon last spring, my videographer friend Kathy, who had lured me here, was hip deep in sheep, determined to film a year in the life of Kent’s herd: 18 ewes, 19 lambs, and one ram. . .
Small Wonders: Ashland Independent Film Festival
“What is it like growing up in front of a video camera?” an audience member at the Ashland Independent Film Festival (AIFF) asked 12-year-old Jonas Brodsky. His mother’s documentary about his being deaf, Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements, had just filled the big screen at AIFF’s opening night, after debuting at Sundance. The film shadows Jonas from his hearing loss at 14 months to his performing the Moonlight Sonata at age 11. Jonas stood on the Ashland stage with his award-winning filmmaking mother, Irene Brodsky, his father and two siblings, and his grandparents, both of whom are deaf. It is an AIFF tradition for filmmakers to answer questions after their film ends. In this case, it was a family affair. . .
10,000 Steps
My husband of almost forty years has become a step-counter, a serious step-counter, with 10,000 his daily minimum. As I write this, he’s making his way up the Mike Uhtoff trail in the mountainous woods behind our house, logging his first 5,000. The app in his back pocket, when he carries it, keeps track. Often, I’m a partner. When we visited Yosemite National Park two weeks ago, we spent one drizzly afternoon walking the valley floor, 20,000 virtuous steps in all. Counting, though, is not the point. It’s the “wellness” motivator that lures us to views of the Rogue Valley on a winter day, to uncurl from the computer and feel sun on our face, to explore a new town without GPS, to hear the wind in the treetops in place of the evening news. . .