Food is the ingredient that binds us together.  — Author unknown Paul Giancarlo remembers reading an article in the Ashland Daily Tidings, a few weeks after Christmas in 2009, about food bank “blues”: how shelves stand precipitously bare after the holiday food drives end. Explaining to his six-year-old twin boys that hunger does not rise and fall with the holidays, that …

Note: This post was inspired by a stunning recent announcement by the publisher and owner of our two local newspapers, letting readers know that he would no longer publish or support liberal points of view. It is part of the much larger story of the demise of local journalism nationwide. I offer more a report than a story, the result of …

“Can you see where you’re going?” I asked Tony as we crept onto Interstate 5, our car headlights glaring back at us in the thick, night fog. Three minutes earlier, when we left our house (elev. 2,200 feet) and headed downhill to the Interstate entrance (elev. 1,900 feet), a crescent moon hung in the sky. Now, 300 feet lower, a …

Living in Ashland, you wouldn’t know there was much of a Latino community here. Salvador, who mows our lawn, laughs and tells me, “We’re invisible to you, but we’re here!”  A tourist town, thanks to the nine-month long Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland boasts over 50 restaurants and 100 lodging options. Predictably, the kitchen workers and cleaners who make up the …

How many trees can you name? Which trees are most common where you live? Do you ever stop to look at the trees that provide you oxygen every day?  Botanists have a word for this: tree blindness. There are times, to be sure, when trees catch our eye and steal our breath — with their brilliant leaves in autumn, their …

See full film (13:40) At eleven o’clock on a bright June day, as the sun warms the morning chill across Rogue Valley, cars packed with families line up at Jewett Elementary School in Central Point. One by one, they drive up to the school entrance where the school’s nutrition staff and volunteers pass out boxes filled with a day’s worth …

Here in Oregon, the tug of war between “progressives” and “patriots,” that sometimes plays out on the streets, shows up at the bottom of the election ballot, too. In 2018, it was the Militia Men that claimed a spot. This year, it’s the psychotherapists. When I cast my first ballot as an Oregonian two years ago, I gasped when I …