Southern Oregon Summer

September 21, 2023

We renewed our website, so we’re going to write more here - not that our lives are so exciting that we have pages to write, but because it’s fun and the internet needs places to go that aren’t selling you anything. We need spaces online created for connection and creativity. This is such a place.

We’ve had a busy year, with lots of travel and a move within Southern Oregon - we moved out of the apartment that was meant to be a temporary place for us to land while we looked for a house to buy/rent back when we moved here in 2019, but then the pandemic hit, and the fires ripped through the valley, taking with it any semblance of housing that might be affordable to a single-ish income house. We were thankful to have such a wonderful place to live for the past five year, while we weathered the pandemic and navigated life as a one income family, but this year we knew it was time to move into a new space, whatever that looked like. We moved into a three bedroom and are still renting from our amazing friends who owned the previous apartment. We are now closer to Max’s work, closer to the bike path, and we have a garage instead of a storage unit for our outdoor gear and bikes and such. We are still a one car family, but Max now only has a 7-mile bike commute to work instead of an 18 mile one, and we get to have more time together in the mornings and evenings.

Our kiddo started kindergarten so I am beginning my new career as car-mom, and so far on the way to school we get gorgeous views of the foothills, the vineyards, the pear orchards, sweet baby fawns, and even a ZEBRA. I also started a paid part-time job for a local coworking space as a support specialist, and continue to run my photography company as time allows. I was able to accompany Max on his work trip to New Zealand earlier this year, which was an absolute dream come true, and will have to be a post in and of itself, as there are too many photos to share here - but it was the longest we’ve been away from our kiddo, and he did great getting spoiled by family in Colorado while we were away for three weeks. He traveled back to Oregon with Max’s mom, and she supported us through our crazy move from Medford to Talent, and during her visit we even got to stay at an AirBnB on a working dairy farm after we moved out of the apartment, and before we could move into the new place.

Now that we are in Talent we have a third bedroom, with a real bed, so we no longer have to host guests with a five year old’s twin bed or our living room couch. We recently had Max’s aunt, uncle, and cousins visit from the east coast, celebrating our 9th wedding anniversary and seeing Twelfth Night at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and my sister also came out from Colorado to visit for a week shortly after that. Unfortunately the week she came out our valley was filled with smoke from several fires burning nearby, and we didn’t get to see Gregory Alan Isakov at the Britt like we had planned - we did, however, still get to see a matinee of RENT at the OSF, and soak up lots of special seester/aunt time together.

The last days of summer were spent similarly to the last year - lots of trips to parks, disc golf, hiking, grocery shopping, making food for our family, watching Star Wars in the evenings - and we are finding a rhythm now that school has officially begun. We have weekly swim lessons and soccer practices, and when we moved into our new place we acquired a piano, so hopefully lessons are in the near future, too. I have a core group of lady friends who get together once a week (if possible) and jam out on our ukuleles, and I’m trying to take as many classes at Talent Maker City or any local art space as possible. I’m writing this from the coworking space I have access to as a perk of my job, and am enjoying being in the presence of adults for the majority of the day now.

Here are a few photos of life these days - I have about 130,000 to choose from on my phone, but I’m trying to be more intentional with my film photography these days, so I’ll try to share more of those here. As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for being here in this space of connection with us.

our traditional stop at the salt flats in Utah on our way back from Colorado

making pasta for friends, and Oregon summer flowers

new books, bike rides to the local skate park, shave ice - summer 2023

getting above the smoke and enjoying delicious donuts while my sister is in town

demi scoops and the first baby tooth lost - summer 2023

soccer practice and walks to Art Bop with Dad

cooling off in the Rogue River and from where naps are taken

Clyde’s Corner and Lithia Park with Aunt Nat

Love and fires in the time of COVID

September 22, 2020

Written September 22, 2020:

I’ve seen a lot of memes about the year 2020, most of which make me laugh and cry equally, which is, I suppose, the point of a meme: to bring the stark reality of life into a humorous light that can only be appreciated while directly experiencing its horrors. (or maybe I’m leaning too much on memes these days?)

The chaos of COVID-19 began, for us, in early March, where our year of travel (we thought) was just beginning. Last year, Sonja K Photography had a full wedding season back in Colorado, so Theo and I traveled back in almost every month of 2019, getting to see family and friends, and never really settling in 100% to our new Oregon home - also hence the lack of posts in 2019- we were BUSY. BUSY BUSY. But it was good busy- and I was looking forward to another full wedding season in 2020, starting off with a trip to San Diego for a photography workshop (alone! In a hotel room on the beach without a toddler! It was glorious!) and then a trip to Colorado for our first wedding of the year. Max officiated, and I photographed our friends’ wedding in Steamboat, which turned out to be Steamboat’s last wedding before their shutdown. We celebrated and stressed, and made our way back to Oregon where we began OUR shutdown.

After getting home, we waited with the world, and watched for signs of coronavirus after traveling, finally breathing a literal sigh of relief when the “two week” period was over and no one we knew got sick while we were there, including the three of us. We were glued to the news day and night, saddened by the horrifying deaths across the world, and scared for what this new reality was going to mean for our family. Fly Water gave the go-ahead for Max to work from home as soon as we returned, and I spent my days entertaining a 2 year old indoors, while Max worked from the kitchen table. It wasn’t NOT stressful, but after a few months, and once parks re-opened and the outside was available for us to use again, we fell into a rhythm which allowed life to go on as normally as possible.

The spring brought zoom birthday celebrations, zoom craft nights, zoom cocktail hours, bi-weekly hauls at the grocery store (alone), wiping down groceries with the precious clorox wipes my parents sent us home with, because there were none in the stores. Honestly, there still might not be any in the stores - I stopped looking after a while. Our local grocery store limited the amount of toilet paper each person could purchase, which thankfully left enough for everyone - but we heard ridiculous stories of people hoarding all sorts of things - toilet paper being one of the most hard to believe (but also not hard to believe at all). Summer crept in, bringing with it nightly neighborhood walks, daily toddler bike-rides around the neighborhood, and still no outside-world interactions other than online. I remember the first time we drove over to a friend’s house in mid-summer, and stood six feet apart out in the yard together, I cried. It has been hard to be separated from people, socializing only via our phones or computer screens, grateful for technology, but saddened by the limitations of physical touch and direct interaction - so quickly ripped away in early March.

My Sonja K Photography wedding season unravelled, wedding by wedding - some of my couples cancelling their big ceremony to instead sign papers at the courthouse, some hopefully delaying until later in the summer, only to eventually elope with their closest family nearby, some postponing completely until 2021 - it’s been a journey. As much as I was heartbroken for my couples, I was at least beginning to enjoy some time settling in and learning to be at home in Oregon. Theo and I were getting outside daily, we had started to do some serious family hikes on the weekends, discovering all the new (to us) places just up the road from where we now live, but then on September 8th the Rogue Valley suffered an extremely devastating fire that ripped through our community and destroyed significant parts of two of the neighboring towns to where we live. It was chaotic and scary; we were one street away from being evacuated. Many of our friends were in the direct path of the fire at one point or another, but luckily everyone we know evacuated safely. The fire wasn’t huge compared to a lot of wildfires (like the Cameron Peak fire, currently blanketing Fort Collins in smoke as I type this, or the East Troublesome Fire, which overnight became large enough to rival the Cameron Peak Fire), but with the dry conditions and the unusually strong winds, it burned more homes than any of the fires I can find listed recently - not to mention there didn’t really seem to be a reliable alert system in place - we found all of the up-to-date information we could bouncing between twitter and the local county facebook page, and trying to decipher the police radio - here’s a recent article about some of that. People are still without power and water, and the fire was just recently declared 100% contained, as rains fell on Southern Oregon. I think over 2300 homes were lost in the fire, and it is going to take years to rebuild. We couldn’t leave our house for two weeks, the smoke was so thick and toxic. In our valley the air quality was about 370 - apparently below 50 is “good” so we were definitely in the “hazardous - do not go outside even for a few minutes” category. With all the fires currently burning across the entire West Coast, there were places in Oregon and California with an air quality index of 700!! Some of the most toxic air ON THE PLANET EARTH!!! Now those air quality levels are being reported from the Colorado front range, sadly.

Through all of this past year I have been riding the rollercoaster of sadness, then outrage, then anger, then heartbreak, then hope, then defeat, then hope again - all while raising a tiny human, trying to remain calm on a daily basis in our tiny apartment space, trying to be strong for my family, trying to resuscitate my business, and trying to guess what the future holds for us, and I keep coming back to gratitude.

I could go on an on about all the bad things that are happening (and I just did) but at the end of the day I am still grateful. This year has taken away so many things I took for granted in the past, things I never thought twice about: clean air, traveling on a whim, dining out with friends, hugs - but it has thrown into perspective what really matters, and that pretty much boils down to our family & friends and our health (physical and mental) - everything else can boil away, and we would still be okay with these things.