Southern Oregon - tourist territory - Rogue River

First a disclaimer. I am an unapologetic southern Oregon booster.
How'd I get so lucky to accidentally land here? Staying put, however,  has been one conscious choice after another since 1971.

Rogue River High School kids painted this mural, which greets anybody who swings into Rogue River  off the freeway.
(Click on the pic for full view.)

My Minnesota sister and niece visited for a week in May. Niece Lisa, age 48, hadn't been here since puberty, and she arrived loaded with a pent-up desire for Oregon-scapes. I was on. We started in my backyard - Rogue River, then moved on to the Applegate Valley, Grants Pass, It's a Burl, the Redwoods and the Oregon coast. I'll get to those later. It was a great week of being a tourist and seeing this part of the world with fresh eyes.
PK and I have lived a mile outside this small town for 35 years. It has its charms. One of them is this mural, and also the local non profit formed to finance additional murals. Supporting public art is a good sign in any area, and particularly in a small rural town.

Sara at Rogue River's Soup Station

Jalapeno burger with cilantro mayo. Wow.

The Soup Station is another local gem. Honestly, its culinary offerings rival the best in the Rogue Valley. Maybe anywhere. Surely, it is a regional highlight. Chief (only?) waiter, Sara, announced during our dinner visit a few days ago that "she was having a heart attack." That was, of course, an exaggeration, but she was flying around there like crazy. Word is getting out about this small family operation that makes almost everything in-house from quality ingredients, and somebody in the kitchen has "the knack" resulting in  entrees that are cooking-show quality. I had a cream cheese-stuffed chicken breast topped with chipotle raspberry sauce. My sister had a jalapeno burger on a pepper cheese bun. Yummm. The place doesn't have a website. You'll just have to go there.

A Rogue River view from the Greenway.

Another local plus is the Rogue River Greenway, a trail that starts under the bridge a mile from our house and will eventually connect Grants Pass to Ashland, with numerous communities in between, a motorized-vehicle-free distance of about 50 miles.  PK is on the Greenway Foundation board, as is good friend, Gail Frank, and like many others, they're working their backsides off to create this huge benefit for locals and visitors alike. In the meantime, the Greenway provides a six-mile round trip from Rogue River to Valley of the Rogue State Park and back. Walk, run, or bike. Don't forget the camera. And if you're a road biker, consider Ride the Rogue on September 18, 2010. This is a quality event (with an unbelievable spread at the finish) attracting over 1,000 riders and many locals who choose the family walks and rides. Me? I'm going for 65 miles.
Other great stuff about Rogue River:
Main Building Supply . Yes, it's a hardware store. No, it isn't a tourist attraction per se. But if you ever want to meet retail staffers who apparently have Ph.Ds in customer service, go there. People travel from other area towns to shop for feed and seed, nails and paint etc. just because of these people. And it's just one block from the Soup Station.

Yoga teacher Denise Elzea doing one of her famous poses.

Yoga at the Community Center Annex, Mondays and Fridays @ 8 a.m.
$7 drop-in and $6 if you buy a punch card for 10 classes. The class is about 75 to 80 minutes long. Because I've done yoga for about 10 years, and the last six with Denise in Rogue River, I too can do the splits! And many other poses that strengthen and flex. Having this class a mile from home is a definite quality-of-life bonus.
The Rogue River Library is also a bonus, along with the hand-carved totem pole out front done by local carver Larry Johnson.
Next: Mother's Day at Rogue Valley Retirement, and a wine tour in the Applegate Valley.

Noah's coming. Is everybody ready?

This is wonderful daughter-in-law, Heather, soon to deliver our first grandchild. Noah. She doesn't look so happy here, but I know that she is. And son Quinn, too. I love the fruition about to occur, and also the great sense of humor demonstrated with the watermelon comparison. I wanted to post here a column I wrote nearly 24 years ago when I was bursting at the seams with son number two, Chris Korbulic. But I can't find it.
Here's what I remember. I was 40 years old. I was barrel-sized. Our little Grants Pass Museum of Art had scored an exhibit by Judy Chicago, The Birth Project. I was just days from giving birth. I was alone. I went into this exhibit, which was in peaceful Riverside Park with the Rogue River flowing past, and felt like all hell had broken loose.
I was surrounded by powerful birth images, women split by lightening bolts, women with life surging, bursting, exuding from them. Women experiencing life recreating itself. Women at one with the universe. Women caught in life's current whether or not they accepted the flow.
That's one of the biggest lessons of giving birth. It is about life going forward. It is not at all about the mother. And certainly not about the father. It is about the baby wanting out, and the moment he or she emerges, that is another person completely separate from the mother and father who created, without any instruction or impulse other than desire, a new life. Love and nurture all you want. That baby will be who he is from day one. And who he wants to be.
Back to Judy Chicago. As a voluminously pregnant woman, I was part of the exhibit. Others in the museum averted their eyes. From me. Did they really want to look at the real thing? Apparently not.

A few days later, we had a new baby. In those days, ultrasound fetal-sex discovery wasn't the norm. I thought we'd have a girl, whose name would have been Amber. Given my age, there was a reasonable chance that our child would have Down's syndrome or some other impairment. But this big baby squirted out, perfect. A nine-pound marvel swimming his way into the universe. Which he is still doing.
Natural childbirth, that is unmedicated childbirth, was all the rage during the 1970s and 80's. I didn't miss a thing either time. I don't recall that it was all that bad. Intense, but in a way to savor, if you can manage it. I was fully alert and aware during the birth of both of our sons. Those moments are peak experiences, the most compelling and pivotal experiences of my life.
All I can say is that having children has been joyful, illuminating, stimulating, revelatory, fun, frightening, and full of lessons.
PK and I hover on the perimeter of this coming event. Welcoming a grandchild adds a whole new dimension to having given birth to Quinn so many years ago, and to dancing at his wedding, and rejoicing in the news that the family will grow. Hello, Noah. I love you already. Whoever you are.

In with the new, out with the old

We think of spring as being all new life, pop-out-of-the soil vegetative wonders. But spring is also the end for some dear friends. Kale, for example. The kale we planted in the fall served us well, and in March and early April it got all pumped up out there in the raised rows despite the dastardly cold and rain and wind and hail. God, I love kale. Not just for how it tastes in stews and stir fries, but for who it is: incredibly tough, sweet, beautiful to look at, and a nutritional powerhouse.
About a month ago, in preparation for spring crops, and in response to the kale plants going into reproductive mode, I advanced upon the kale plot with a sharp knife and a tall kitchen garbage bag and laid waste. The harvest filled the bag.
The kale patch was maybe five feet by two or three feet. A tiny piece of earth, really. But still, after a long winter, we are kale-infused and green-tinged from this small plot, and we also have freezer bags of kale for ..... when? December, January, and into mid-February, the garden dormancy times in Southern Oregon.

Also rousted from the soon-to-be-spring garden was the volunteer red lettuce, which entwined in its bountiful exuberance with weeds to make a colorful patch. A healthy garden is loaded with volunteers, and it's kinda sad to cut em down to make way for the next generation. We always have volunteer lettuce, flowers, dill, and lots more, but end up either routing or relocating them to make way for the new delicacies.  Such as onions. Onions are usually cheap at the grocery store, so why grow them? Too many reasons to list, but just let me say "caramelized." We planted four or five varieties, some sweet with short-storage expectations and others meant for long life in our cool back-porch cupboards.

Onions ready to start the garden game. They always win.

And here are potatoes properly treated and dried for planting. Unfortunately, the day after the onions and potatoes initiated the spring garden, the sky cut loose with more rain, wind, hail and on and on. It pelted the garden for several days with sufficient force to loosen onions and many had to be replanted. As for the potatoes, the potato gods say not to water them until they push through with shoots. They could be rotting out there. We'll see.

Tomato plants surrounded by geraniums, which have been blooming for months. Waiting in the wings. Everybody's itching to go outside.

In the meantime, unseasonably cool and wet weather continues, and in the solarium, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and flowers are getting leggy and impatient and aphid-threatened waiting for their moment in the sun. Spring. It's coming. I know it.

Stand and deliver!

It's a miserable rainy day. PK is at a conference. Except for an hour or so of paid work, I have nothing pressing. In short, I'm blessed with a perfect day at home alone with a big block of uninterrupted time to write. Except for one thing. Sitting at the computer for hours on end makes me so cranky. And creaky. And fat. I can feel my butt revolt as its capillaries close off, then spread out in defiance to fill my cushy office chair. I'm afraid to look, but I think it drapes over the sides.
 I'm compelled to get up and walk around, climb the stairs, stretch. On a nice day, I find it particularly difficult to stay seated. I have fantasized often, but obviously without imagination, about a work station that requires me to stand. As I became one with my chair this morning, I had an AHA!! moment induced by this New York Times Magazine article. It's all about the effects of exercise on weight. It concludes:

In a completed but unpublished study conducted in his energy-metabolism lab, Braun and his colleagues had a group of volunteers spend an entire day sitting. If they needed to visit the bathroom or any other location, they spun over in a wheelchair. Meanwhile, in a second session, the same volunteers stood all day, “not doing anything in particular,” Braun says, “just standing.” The difference in energy expenditure was remarkable, representing “hundreds of calories,” Braun says, but with no increase among the upright in their blood levels of ghrelin or other appetite hormones. Standing, for both men and women, burned multiple calories but did not ignite hunger. One thing is going to become clear in the coming years, Braun says: if you want to lose weight, you don’t necessarily have to go for a long run. “Just get rid of your chair.”

YES! I shoved my chair aside and bolted for a bookcase full of little-used tomes. My keyboard now sits atop three generations of the Atlas of Oregon, a picture book entitled Tibet, and my son Quinn's master's thesis. My mouse roams over History of Art,  Macmillan's Illustrated Animal Encyclopedia, and Bill Moyers' World of Ideas. How to Write a Nonfiction Book Proposal and Ghostwriting for Fun & Profit prop my computer screen at the appropriate angle. I have been standing for nearly five hours. I am so happy! Perhaps the ever-resourceful PK will look upon my improvised "stand and deliver" space and rush out to his workshop to whip up something more aesthetically pleasing. Til then, it's me and the books.

A spectacular late-bloomer

This cactus hangs all year in the solarium, and for the past few springs, it has come to life with amazing three-inch long luscious-looking stunners.

Right now, this baby has about 30 bedazzling blooms in various states of emergence, which are driving the hummingbirds outside insane.  At least 25 years ago when I was working for a newspaper, a woman I interviewed—she called herself the Plant Doctor—gave me this cactus in a much smaller state of being. She was moving and needed to off-load.
I stuck it in a six-inch raku hanging pot and paid scant attention as we raised two boys and some tomatoes and made a living and the years flew by. I don't even know why I kept it. It's was a spindly sad-looking specimen for most of its life. It never produced a flower.
Despite its homeliness, I brought it along the four years we moved to Grants Pass for our son, Chris, to go to a better high school, and then hauled it back when we returned in 2004 to our country home. It's still in the same pot, the same soil as the mid-1980s. The cactus first exploded with color and drama in 2006 or 2007 and is now kicken out the jams more spectacularly than ever before.
I've never really understood "late bloomer" but now I do. Twenty-five years? Come on!  And in my irresistible impulse to apply metaphor, I think of the human late bloomers I have known, and I think they are even more richly colored and interesting than the cactus. The cactus, after all, will soon revert to dormancy. Those human late bloomers? They just get more colorful.