January 30, 2024 Canvassing is not for the faint of heart, especially if you are allergic to rejection like me.  A few weeks ago, I belatedly signed up to gather the last round of signatures for a local petition called “Jackson County for All,” a citizen’s initiative to reconstitute Jackson County’s Board of Commissioners, a personal nemesis in my four-year …

Anne Lamott, 2021 (photo by her son, Sam Lamott) As many of you may know, Anne Lamott was my inspiration for starting this blog — and keeping at it the past five years. Starting when 69-year-old Lamott entered her early 60s, she began writing and speaking about the gifts and challenges of aging, along with life lessons she has learned. …

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 …