At age 95, Agnes Pilgrim Baker deserves the title “living cultural legend” as much as anyone I almost know. After watching hours of videos of her talking about being a “voice for the voiceless,” I’m a big fan. Grandma Aggie, as she is known, is the oldest living female left of the Rogue River Indians, the Takelmas, who lived in Southern …

Farmers’ markets are the fasting growing segment of the U.S. food marketplace, with over 8,000 nationwide. USA Today just named the Rogue Valley Growers & Crafters Market, “our” market, one of the ten best in the country. I was brought up believing fresh vegetables were sacred, and I’ve always tended a vegetable garden. Just before my husband and I impulsively sold …

In the 1950’s, when I was growing up in New Jersey, Halloween was not a family affair. I couldn’t imagine my father dressing up as Captain America or my mother as a poodle-skirted Dream Girl and getting in on the action—nor, I’m sure, could they.  What I remember, actually, was the night before Halloween, called Mischief Night, when my friends and I …

Central Park is to New York City as Lithia Park is to . . . Ashland. With its 93 acres of curving walkways, woodsy paths, and cascading water, Lithia Park draws a million visitors a year, in a town of 21,000.  Designed over a century ago by Golden Gate Park’s Superintendent McLaren, the park is on the National Register of Historic Places. …

 “That sounds like a crow!” I said to Tony as we entered Ashland’s Starbucks early the other morning. I scanned the room, with its small tables bunched together and a half dozen guests, most familiar to us. We passed Josh, who parks a 1970s Chevy van loaded with his life’s belongings in front of Starbucks every morning, turns his music …

“I’ve often wondered why I didn’t protest more as a teen-ager,” writes Alexandra Schwartz, a child of the nineties, in this week’s New Yorker. “Surely there was a lot to be mad about.” My second day of high school, in New York, fell on September 11, 2001. A year and a half later, hundreds of thousands of people, here and …

Despite the sunshine that fills Southern Oregon these last days of summer, it feels like we’re living in a darkly satirical novel about the near future, when mass shootings have become so frequent that they are part of the daily routine. Every week or two, these past months, there’s been another slaughter, occasionally more than one on the same day. …