Idaho Voices

The local casinos have nothing on Inland Northwest gardeners. Mother Nature starts the gardening year with the deck and she deals what she wants. We can only hope to draw a good hand with our experience and effort.

“People of all ages are linking arms, sashaying, and do-si-do-ing themselves to longer, healthier and happier lives,” said Linda Shinn, president of the Coeurly Q’s Square and Round Dance Club. In their long prairie skirts, Levis and neatly ironed shirts, square dancers are easily recognizable, and people love to watch them swing.

When Lake City long-distance runner C.J. Helbling was a freshman, he was an immediate challenger for a state championship. Now in his senior year, Helbling continues to be a state-title contender. And if he doesn’t capture what has proven so far to be elusive, he will be completely at peace.

Diane Rowen Garmire is an artist who has fully integrated art into her daily life. Though she is fairly obscure in the art “scene,” she has a captured audience – hundreds of them have been enthralled by her artistic prowess and motivated by her creative energy. A teacher and advocate of the arts in education, Rowen Garmire said, “I don’t know how to teach without art. I don’t know how to be an artist without teaching.” Rowen Garmire began her artistic journey at age 6, when she broke one of her mother’s crystal goblets and put it back together in the form of a sculpture. She went on to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwest Nazarene University in Idaho and then a Master of Arts in teaching from the University of Idaho in 1981.

In Sandpoint, neighbors and friends are like family. It is part of what makes this town a true community. Those involved with a relatively new Sandpoint organization, NAMI Far North, hope the people of this town will embrace community members who struggle with day-to-day challenges. NAMI Far North is the Sandpoint chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. On Saturday, the group will hold an event called Take a Seat at the Table – an ice cream social that will bring people together to raise money and awareness of diseases that have long been misunderstood and whose victims suffer in silence due to the stigma frequently associated with mental illnesses.