Historic Brownsville

Ashland, Oregon, April 22—

AFTER A DELICIOUS breakfast at Pearl Bakery — pain aux raisins and a cappuccino — we drove to Brownsville, a curiously old-fashioned mill town a few miles east and south of Albany, for lunch with an old friend at the Corner Café. Storefront; glass on two sides; tables for four, booths; every surface but the windows painted white.

The chairs were oddly low to the floor, as if for a primary school; and some of the decor consisted of what seemed to be chair-legs and -stretchers, sawn away from their sources and set upright like organ pipes on the plate-rails running along the walls.

Soups, sandwiches, salads. I had half a chef's salad and a chicken-artichoke bake, which turned out to be curried chicken with artichoke chunks, better than you might think, with a glass of iced tea. This was a trip back to the 1940s, really; and the lettuces in the salad, from a local garden, were delicious and authentic.

Dinner at the motel: salami and bread, raw cauliflower and carrot; and a glass of Albariña at a wine bar after the play...