Ellen Waterston

Those of us over 65 who have health and stamina thank our lucky stars every day. Realizing that won’t always be so results in a kind of weird frenzy… stop and smell the flowers but at the same time, go, go, go! Less superficially, with the easing of cultural, social and professional pressures during the […]

If you’re petless, living alone and over (or cresting) the proverbial hill, expect to be told to get a dog either by your children, grandchildren or younger friends. Could it be the younger generation feels sorry for us fogies, equate being alone with lonely? Perhaps they don’t yet appreciate their own company, a guilty pleasure […]

Go ahead, call me a batrachopile, a ranidaphile. You can have your crocus, your yellow blaze of forsythia and daffodil, or the exuberant conk-la-ree song of the red winged blackbird as it heralds its return north. For me the real sign of spring is the sound of the peeper, the tiny, paper clip-sized tree frog […]

Happy Daylight Saving Time! Sorry to say, no time has actually been saved, just shifted. We lose an hour in March to “spring forward” by adding daylight to the evening and gain an hour or “fall back” in November by adding daylight to the morning. Make sense? Not to me. But apparently it did to […]

I have a feeling none of you currently have (or ever had) “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” on the top of your must-read list, especially considering the subtitle: “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” It sounds boring but trust me, Lynne Truss’s book, first published in the early 2000s and still going strong, is hysterically funny. The […]

There’s often a hard edge to New Year’s resolutions. A punitive subtext. A get with it, do more, do better tone. If ever there was a year for a kinder, gentler take on being our best selves, 2024 might just be it. I am not a birder, not by a stretch, though I am devoted […]

Sometimes something happens out of the blue that restores your belief everything is right with the world. Moments like these are precious. I recently had one: a friend emailed, instructing me to drop everything, grab my skates, there’s black ice at Todd Lake! I come by my love of black ice honestly. During the winters […]

On Veterans Day, nearly 3,000 flags lined the main streets of towns across central Oregon with Redmond, aka Flag City, USA, in the lead with 1,600 stars and stripes placed by volunteers hours before that city’s parade began. Throughout the region, the best of hometown parade pageantry was on full display: high school bands, Girl […]

What are your autumn memories and traditions? Making favorite soup recipes? Taking in a film festival? Bagging a deer, antelope or elk? Tailgating with friends at a football game? Fall has arrived. What a beauty, with Indian Summer prolonging outdoor playtime against a multi-colored display of foliage. It’s hard for me to imagine living somewhere […]