Columns

Phyllis was born in San Francisco in 1948 and attended high school and nursing school in Sacramento. Though she always wanted a career as an artist, her parents gave her only three choices: teacher, secretary or nurse.

A month after the Walbridge Fire destroyed our home at the end of Palmer Creek Road, I finally had a chance to hike beyond the rubble of our house to see what effect the fire had on the 55 acres of forest my husband and I had bought back in 1989, the forest where we'd lived ever since.

Marijuana continues to be in the local news just as we promised last year that it would. The latest news is next week’s special election to create a “cannabis business tax” in the unincorporated areas of Sonoma County. The single ballot item is called Measure A.

Our shared disdain for PG&E turning the lights out on us while we were running from the threat of the Kincade wildfire is not the only thing that should be uniting us right now. This time there was no loss of life. This time we “only” lost 141 homes in Sonoma County, nothing close to the 5,600 torched by the Tubbs fire in 2017. But this time the economic impact in evacuation costs, days of lost work, a week of lost business revenues, canceled trips to our Wine Country and possibly the permanent closure of some local businesses is much more widespread.

Everybody likes to yell at their TVs when the news comes on in the evening, and people can’t help bashing the news sources they disagree with the most. Either you like CNN and The New York Times or you are a FOX follower and are convinced The Washington Post is full of “fake news.”

Members of the Friends of the Healdsburg Library (FoHL) were pleased to see so many people eager to check out their book sale last week. FoHL book sales often mark our busiest weeks of the year, and this was no exception.

The Saturday market opened mid-April, and Tuesday’s first market was the end of May. I’m happy to report both are flourishing, despite all that’s happening in our world right now.