Clockwise: Stills from “Aftersun,” “Faces Places,” “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” “The Quiet Girl” The Academy Awards are upon us. “And the winner is . . .”  For as long as I can remember, I have watched the Oscars, even though some years I’ve seen only one or two of the nominees. In 1966, I joined 50 of my freshmen dormitory …

“I love trains,” my three-and-a-half year-old grandson whispered to me, in the dark, as we drove from the Medford International airport to our Ashland home. Along with his parents — our younger son Dan and partner Einor — Damian had flown from Denver to spend Thanksgiving with us. He wasn’t telling me something I didn’t already know.  Tony and I …

Images from Uproot Meats website (still up today) that portray earlier times. The photos of pigs and poultry were fake from the start: grass has never grown on the barren hillside Krista Vegter “farms.” When I moved from Brooklyn to Ashland five years ago, I never imagined I would get caught up fighting a pig farm on a denuded slope …

ASPIRE office, Ashland High School “I’ve lived in Ashland all my life. I want to go away to college,” Emma, then a rising senior at Ashland High School (AHS), told me last spring. I had recently signed up to be a mentor in the high school’s ASPIRE program, designed to support juniors and seniors as they sort out post-graduation plans. “My dream is …

In a previous post, I described my family’s mutigenerational attachment to math, travel — and mountains. I wrote about Pikes Peak in Colorado, a family favorite for more than a hundred years, which my husband Tony and I (re)visited during our stay this summer in Denver.  More striking than the panorama from the top, I later learned, were the stories that …

In the mountaineering parlance of the Western United States, a “fourteener” is a mountain peak with an elevation of at least 14,000 ft. The 96 fourteeners in the United States are all west of the Mississippi River and  Colorado has the most (53) of any single state. Last week, Tony and I—on a two-month hang-out with our grandson in Denver, …

These have been tough weeks, bracketed by searing heat (certainly here in Southern Oregon) and scathing Supreme Court decisions. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed, even though there are so many untold stories — stories mainstream media find unprofitable — that provide occasions for hope. (I cherish the newsletter from Jessica Craven that lists and reminds us of these small …