“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 in February. The film shadows Jonas from …

“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 sheep right out of the gate,” he said. “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. …

“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 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 …

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 9 of the annual 20-inch rain total—failed to deliver.

In the early 1900s, throngs of tourists would detrain at the Southern Pacific Railroad station at “A” Street 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, with eight trains arriving and departing daily between the two cities. …

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, marked by division and animosity based on group differences. My move to Ashland included a large wish for the opposite—to connect. I imagined an expanding circle of nearby friends, built upon differences as much …

We are so lucky. From early spring to late fall, the Rogue Valley Growers Market puts organic, locally-grown produce at our fingertips. In an earlier post, I wrote about this twice-weekly bounty, a feast for the body, eyes, and the soul—also a gathering that brings small farmers and the community together.

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. It’s so low key that we missed the “pick-up” spot the first time. 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.