Columns

TIME magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ for 2018 is a group of imprisoned and slain journalists. The selection honors journalists as “guardians of the truth.” Besides being slain and jailed, journalists everywhere now face toughening challenges to investigate, report and defend the truth. This is true in oppressive non-democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Myanmar and it is true right here where economic factors are eliminating journalist’s jobs and where our president calls journalists “enemies of the people.”

Looking for a lost pet or a new four-legged friend? See the list of incoming strays and the selection of cats and dogs available for adoption from the Healdsburg Center for Animals.

The holiday season is in full swing, which can be a mixed bag because all that holiday cheer costs time and money that most of us don’t have, but even the Scroogiest person has to admit, there’s something magical about it all coming together.

Some of you may be familiar with the Elf on the Shelf phenomenon. The idea is there is a small elf doll that appears in your home the month before Christmas, and each night he reports back to Santa on the naughty or nice behavior in your home. You know he went to the North Pole because he is in a different place each morning. It’s magic!

“I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

For those born here and for the rest of us who now claim Sonoma County as our home, we share a sense of pride and place we like to call the spirit of Sonoma.

“Always be funny,” directed a customer/reader at a farmer’s market one day, years ago. Ironically, it is funny that I can’t recall the person’s name or face but I can’t forget the wistful directive.

Looking for a lost pet or a new four-legged friend? See the list of incoming strays and the slideshow (above) of cats and dogs available for adoption from the Sonoma Humane Society, Healdsburg Center.

If there was a farming gold standard that recognized exceptional growing, sort of an Oscar or an Emmy Award equivalent, I think it would go to Tierra Vegetables.

Earlier this week, with smoke finally dispersed by welcome rains, I was driving a carpool of teenagers through Santa Rosa at the break of dawn. The autumn golden light of the rising sun highlighted seasonal colors of surrounding vineyards. Even trees blackened by last year’s fires, moist from recent rains, were glistening.