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I received the dreadful news in the middle of the night. News I knew I could expect. All the same, it smacked me in the face. Shock. My healthy though declining – as age tends to do for us – 84-year-old mother, passed away suddenly. I’d called my mom at the same time on the same day every week for the last sixteen years I’d lived away from the iconic seaside village of La Conner, where she lovingly made her home to raise us kids. Because I’d also phone her whenever I received big n...
Perhaps Morris Street is this town’s Rodney Dangerfield, not able to get respect. Is First Street the blond muscle boy, kicking sand in scrawny Morris’s face? Morris, the street with the long term empty storefronts, is getting attention from Shelter Bay resident and entrepreneur Ward Phillips. He has bought, and spruced up, the 503 building, long inhabited by Krista Sunday. Phillips wants sculptures and trees and corner park landscapes the length of the street. He wants an arch –think Ana...
Football is always on the menu for Thanksgiving. But, in La Conner, it’s just the appetizer. That’s because Guy and Marla Vallee and the folks at Waterfront Cafe make it possible to feast on fellowship and a free five-star turkey dinner as well. It’s a favorite holiday tradition here going on over the last decade. “We decided in 2009, with the economy being tight, that there were probably people who could use a free meal on Thanksgiving,” says Guy. “We also knew there were people with no place to go, that maybe they were separated by long dista...
Exercise is just what the doctor ordered for Yvonne Naughton. It’s advice she doesn’t ignore because she literally wrote her own prescription. The 40-year-old Irish-born doctor, who had been an award-winning athlete in her youth, drifted off-track, so to speak, after a ruptured appendix and subsequent second surgery put her distance running on hold. So did life in general. “The next 13 years or so flashed past in a blur,” Naughton, who lives and trains in the SneeOosh area near La Conner,...
La Conner Rotary’s own Santa, president-elect John Milnor, is once again suiting up for photos with Santa during the club’s 13th annual Santa Breakfast at Maple Hall Saturday, 8:30-11 a.m. Pet photos with Santa are new this year, with or without kids posing with the jolly old man. A pancake breakfast will be served: $7 for adults and $3 for children 10 and under. There is no additional charge for photos, but donations are gladly accepted to help support the La Conner Rotary Club’s literacy initi...
Of all the true stories we need to hear, the one of the fragility and failing of the fishes of the Salish Sea is one of the most important and yet faintest. For fifteen weeks this fall, KNKX, public radio from Seattle, brought a variety of stories to us as they reflected on their “Return to the Salish Sea.” We can’t say we don’t know. Seventy-eight orcas and consistently plummeting salmon stocks are not just numbers signaling a wakeup call. They are a countdown to a disaster. A church friend told me that a fundraising consultant teaches that a...
I contributed to the overflow crowd at the all school band and choir concert two weeks ago. There weren’t 76 trombone and no attempt at a parade of any size, but all 51 fifth graders were on stage at the start. That is quite an accomplishment and one in which everyone involved can be rightly proud. We are fortunate to have a school district that makes available a musical instrument to every student wanting to be in the band. That is quite a commitment as well as an expense. No, actually, first, we are fortunate the school district hired M...
“Water and sky, mountain and forest, clad in sunshine and clouds, are composed in landscapes sublime in magnitude, yet exquisitely fine and fresh, and full of glad, rejoicing life.” A tender, gentle love note to Puget Sound delivered by perhaps the most deft hand possible: John Muir. He marveled in 1889 at the abundant wildlife, the “beautiful curves around bays,” and “the islands, with soft, waving outlines, lavishly adorned with spruces and cedars.” His words paint a picture of a land of ric...