Columns

The last few months have been difficult for 56-year-old LaMarion Spence. The beloved Healdsburg resident since 1999 and founder of Seeded Juice Company has been battling lung cancer for years, and the fight has intensified in recent weeks.

It’s the holidays. I can feel the anticipation as Christmas break draws near, two glorious weeks off school for my teenagers. But I also feel the two stress balls festering as their workload doubles in the next few weeks as classes wrap up for the new year. So, what kind of holiday season will it be? “Bah-humbug or “let’s be merry and bright.”

Windsor Creek has been having a ton of exciting events and we have many more to look forward to. In November, we had our annual food drive and donated over 400 cans of food to the Windsor Food Alliance.

Lots of meetings and talk going on in our community regarding Wikiup Commons.

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.

If Charles Dickens was still with us, he might have written about Windsor and Paradise, instead of London and Paris, in his historical novel, "A Tale of Two Cities."

“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.”

Among the many other benefits of living in beautiful and bountiful Sonoma County are our relative low level of crime and a feeling of safety in our neighborhoods, towns and highways. We should neither take this sense of security for granted nor disregard how dear a price we pay for our law enforcement and safekeeping.

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.