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“So here we go again,” commented Cristal Perkins, co-owner of Santo Coyote Mexican Kitchen, to a survey asking La Conner businesses and institutions about their preparations and frustrations over the wearing masks indoors statewide mandate. Santo Coyote staff have been wearing masks all month and Perkins put their “'mask required" sign back up on the doors Aug. 18.

Rosi and Wes Jensen at Fine Feather Friends never stopped wearing masks, “even though we are vaccinated,” she wrote. Volunteer staff at Vintage Thrift Store and customers have been required to wear masks since the store reopened in the spring.

Staff of the La Conner Regional Library, the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum and the Skagit County Historical Museum have started wearing masks over the last couple of weeks. Masks are back on staff at La Conner Coffee Company and Two Moons Gallery the past 10 days or so. Like their peers, they have posted masks required signs at their entrances.

Many establishments have free masks available at their doors.

Owners, managers and their staffs are all prepared to, as the Two Moons Gallery Alan Darcy wrote, “politely tell them that they have every right to not wear a mask elsewhere, but to remain in our store they will have to wear one.”

The Salted Grape’s Leslie Grover says unmasked people can eat on their patio if there is room, but are not allowed inside without a mask. Pat Ball, owner of The Slider Café, will tell people refusing to wear masks “they are free to try somewhere else.” His concern of “moving backwards” is shared on Morris and First streets. Perkins is “nervous about a possible return to phases or limited capacity indoor seating, between dealing with all the supply and food shortages and now the uncertainty of going into the fall, I'm definitely feeling the stress.”

Grover responded, “We would not survive another (closure) as a restaurant.”

The Lincoln Theatre’s Brandy Young also fears business closures. She is “frustrated with the lack of cooperation from the community to comply with requests to get vaccinated and wear masks. The lack of compassion and paranoia that is out there is hard to cope with,” she wrote.

Executive Director of the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum Amy Green’s concerns for this fall are the same as in 2020: “Same old stuff …. more COVID, more restrictions, lack of revenue. I saw a big improvement over the past two months in visitors, but I am just as quickly seeing it go away.”

La Conner Coffee Company’s Pam Fields’ sentiments are similar to her peers: “I'm concerned about the delta variant and people's refusal to recognize how serious this is and getting vaccinated. I don't understand how people cannot recognize that we can't return to something near normal if we don't get more of the population vaccinated. It frustrates me that this has all become political rather that a safety issue.”

The worst case scenario of limiting social activity is a worry. “We are extremely concerned about the rise in COVID-19 cases in Skagit County, and the possibility that we will need go back to limited occupancy, or perhaps the need to close for our own safety,” responded Dyann Provenzano, Vintage Thrift Store committee co-chair.

Jo Wolfe, director of the Skagit County Historical Museum, sees the possibility of case “numbers will continue to rise and we will have to totally shut down again.”

Jensen, a naturalist, noted that without a very high percentage of a vaccinated population providing herd immunity “it was only a matter of time for the variant to spread faster than the original virus. As for the future, we hope that those who haven’t been vaccinated, will have this done and we can put the pandemic behind us! Otherwise variants will still develop and we’re in an endless circle. It depends on this outcome how our businesses in town will be doing in the future!”