Morning Light: Wildflowers, Night Skies, and Other Ordinary Joys of Oregon Country Life

When Barbara Drake and her husband left Portland and moved to a small farm in western Oregon's Yamhill Valley in the late 1980s, they saw it as a temporary relocation-they would return to the city eventually. But as the couple's experiences on the farm multiplied-training herding dogs, enlisting a pair of traveling dowsers to help them find a good well, and stargazing in a singular nighttime darkness-they decide to hang on to their rural life as long as possible. In Morning Light Drake articulates the lessons she's learned from her long stint of country living. Replete with records of native wildflowers, an encounter with an elderly man who lived on her farm eighty years ago, and an old family recipe for wild blackberry pudding, Morning Light is an appreciation and exploration of a landscape and a way of life she has come to know intimately.