It’s Oregon’s 149th birthday, and it’s Valentine’s Day, a perfect time to ask: What’s not to love about Oregon? We can’t think of a single thing. (Well, OK, this has been a particularly gray and cold variety of winter, but we noticed a hawthorne tree in bloom along the highway, and lots of daffodils are starting to show up, so the fact that we had more snow in the mountains this year than we have in about 50 years is forgiven, for the most part.)

We know we’re fortunate to be living here. Everyone tells us so. The fact that Oregon remains one of the most frequent destinations for in-migration (a trend that’s much older than our state); that Portland is rated among the most livable big cities in the United States (and the best place in to the nation to have a baby) is almost not even news.

Ashland ranks as one of the best small towns in the country for arts lovers. Bend is booming as an outdoor lifestyle mecca. (And we’re not too jealous that it has 300-plus days of sunshine a year. Truth be told, lots of people who live in western Oregon kinda like the gray skies and green landscape.)

And Corvallis holds its own nationally for both livability and as a finalist for all sorts of “best of” lists, from safest city to fifth-smartest city to coolest college town and (on our admittedly biased list) to best all-around place to call home.

You could say we had a good start on things. Some of the folks who began the in-migration were pretty special themselves. William Clark, Meriwether Lewis, Toussaint Charbonneau, his wife Sacagawea and several of their associates helped put Oregon on the map when they spent the winter of 1805-06 camped along an Oregon tributary of the Columbia River.

They had a lot of hearty stock to follow. Let’s remember that among the 300,000 or so people who relied on wagons and oxen and such to get them here via the Oregon Trail between 1840 and 1860, about 53,000 of them stayed here. They included Jason Lee, who founded Willamette University — the oldest university in the West — in 1842. It wasn’t easy. An early note about the first freshman class was that some of its members were killed “due to some mischief by bears.”

Due to those who braved the hazards of disease (the most frequent cause of death on the Oregon Trail), we’re living in what was really considered the real “gold” they sought: the richest agricultural land to catch a seed, the Willamette Valley.

Those pioneers wrote home of dirt so rich, you could eat it with a spoon. We who live in the mid-valley still thrill at the sight of seeing the valley come to life this time of year — just in time for Oregon’s birthday.

The mid-valley saw some tough times in the 1980s, when Oregon’s heavily resource-based economy promptly reinvented itself. Ever since, we’ve been on the forefront of both technological and global trade innovations.

Now we in Corvallis are at the eipcenter of endeavors to craft solutions to problems as challenging as global warming and renewable energy. Perhaps our willingness to take on big problems with determination and optimism accounts in some part for why Oregon’s economy remains relatively prosperous. We could go on, but it would just be bragging.

To those who are celebrating their own personal relationships with wine and roses today, we suggest remembering Oregon as well. It’s not to soon to begin celebrating that big birthday that comes around next year.