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. …

As I write this, a Red Flag Fire Warning hangs over the Rogue River Valley. Distant thunder and dark clouds, a rare presence in our resolutely blue summer skies, raise the specter of wildfires sparked by lightning strikes. Last summer, a rash of thunderstorms one weekend in July set in motion 163 wildfires across Oregon, with Southern Oregon bearing the …

The far-flung  town of Burns in Central Oregon, is not, strictly speaking, where followers of Ammon and Ryan Bundy took over a federal building and plotted the overthrow of the American government in 2016. That is 30 flat and lonely miles south. Still, Burns is out there, in the middle of nowhere. It’s the population hub (at 2,800) of Harney County, the largest …

Today, I became a sponsor for a draft horse named Gandalf, a rescue horse who lives at the Equamore Sanctuary three miles from our house. He’s black with a white spot between his eyes, stands almost 16 hands (5.3 feet), weighs 1,700 lbs., and believes in second chances. As a girl, I never went horse crazy like my nextdoor neighbor, Eliza, …