Columns

Winter greetings from the Healdsburg Library. We continue to work preparing for additional open hours as a result of the passage of Measure Y. As you may have heard, the library system is hiring over 30 new positions across the county. We anticipate many additional positions opening up over the next year as we work to improve library services and continue to expand open hours. In addition, we face an uncommon opportunity to improve our collections. As always, we wish to provide the most helpful information we can. If you have suggestions — such as magazine subscriptions you wish we would provide — we are all ears. We still can’t provide everything, but we’ll try to grant requests if we can.

This news organization and community journalism institution focuses on local news, leaving national and world events to larger news sources. But there are times when our close-to-home happenings are overtaken by historical occurrences. Certainly, the violent attack on Jan. 6, 2021 of our U.S. Capitol and Congress was such a date.

Hopper services to continue Thursdays through Sundays

It’s only just beginning. Hundreds and hundreds of first-person accounts of both tragedy and loss and heroics and generosity will soon grow into thousands of interwoven threads that will become the history of the firestorm of October 2017. With time, the beginning hours of the wind-whipped firebombs and mass evacuations that started with a spark on Oct. 7 and 8 will be joined in historic texts by countless tales of rescue, relief and recovery.

The other day, I took my teenage daughter shopping for some new school items. We ended up at one of those large, overwhelming, colorful makeup stores. I gave her a budget and told her I would meet her in the front of the store in half an hour. I happened to see her talking with one of the sales associates. She was animated and happy; in her element if you will. I could honestly see her becoming a makeup artist for movies, plays and weddings.

Autumn light slashes through a dazzling collection of pumpkins. Once upon a time, it seemed all pumpkins were orange. Now, they come in a plethora of colors ranging from orange to red, yellow, green, white and striped combinations. Pumpkin is a vernacular term for winter...