Cynthia Taggart

A woman's order for $200 worth of custom knitting was more powerful than any medication Kathy Peterman has taken for depression. The woman was shopping at The Associate's Gallery, a new store Peterman manages in Coeur d'Alene. The gallery is stocked with attractive gifts – beaded jewelry, paintings, sand candles, woven boxes, knitted scarves – mostly handmade by people struggling with schizophrenia, bipolarity, depression and other stifling mental illnesses.

If Michael Shea had his druthers, his son Mick would take his nose out of a book and mine silver underground next to his dad. It's dirty work, but manly and respectable, even if miners can't finish a sentence without coughing a few times in the middle. But bigger problems push Mick's dreams of college to the back of Michael's mind. His wife is struggling with a pregnancy, union miners blast the anti-union Bunker Hill Mine with dynamite and most Silver Valley men, including 14-year-old Mick, are arrested, fed from pig troughs and held indefinitely.

THANKS, BUT our soldiers in Iraq don't need any more lip balm or boxes of disintegrated cookies. Christmas trees are a nice sentiment but a bit bulky for soldiers who have to carry their belongings wherever they move.

JENNY BROOKS, 11, is no stranger to cancer. She and classmate Sam Fortis, 11, throw around terms such as CAT scan as comfortably as they talk about juggling in their fifth-grade class at Coeur d'Alene's Sorensen Elementary. "I want kids to know it's not their fault," Jenny says, her brown eyes pools of seriousness. "I always thought it was my fault my great-grandmother Ruth got cancer, but I never knew her."

If they had to do it again, Lynn Peterson and Kathy Reed still would place a roof over the heads of Coeur d'Alene's homeless. But they'd pave the bizarrely bumpy road that led to the opening of St. Vincent de Paul Society's Transitional Housing Center 10 years ago. "It was a nightmare from the beginning," says Kathy, chuckling. She's the social services director for the society's Coeur d'Alene operation. "You have to be careful what you ask for."

Christmas tradition means more than pretty lights, fancy wreathes and red and green everything to Garry and Karen Davis. It means porcelain women, blue and green glaciers and wooden heads that resemble Boris Karloff. It means bronze horses the size of a coffee mug and speckled granite hands. The Davises drive all the way from Tekoa to Coeur d'Alene the first Friday of December for the opening of the Art Spirit Gallery's small works exhibit. The annual show draws so many people to the spacious gallery on Sherman Avenue that it's easy to assume that the entertainment behind the thick wooden doors is live.

Tibetan monks are rare in American communities so their spiritual teachings aren't as available as the sermons at the local Presbyterian or Baptist churches. Some people believe Americans need exposure to a greater variety of cultures and spiritual thoughts. That's why Sandpoint's Morning Light Foundation is bringing to Sandpoint this week five days of films, music and speakers from around the world. The foundation's Festival of the Spirit runs Thursday through Sunday, mostly at the Panida Theater. It includes sand painting by visiting Tibetan monks, films on Native American beliefs and spiritual practices in 24 countries covering six continents and discussions on personal spiritual searches.

IF MARRIAGE THERAPISTS can repair some of the most-damaged relationships ever, maybe they deserve a shot at finding peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. That's the thought behind an invitation Coeur d'Alene marriage therapist Al Turtle recently received to Istanbul, Turkey. An Israeli counselor and a Palestinian hospital administrator asked Al to join an experiment in communication between five Israeli couples and five Palestinian couples. If Al and other therapists can teach the 20 people to speak to each other with non-threatening words, the experiment could lead eventually to similar therapy for policy-makers from the two countries.

The Bayview that wooed Linda Hackbarth was sepia, from the forested hills around Lake Pend Oreille to the wooden hotels and stores along the waterfront to the logs clustered behind tugs on the water. Even the bearded loggers gathered on the docks were sepia, and so were the women with their determined faces and work dresses. The Bayview that snagged Linda's heart was older than her grandparents and captured in snapshots Roy and Ethel Ellis collected from neighbors for years. Those photographs didn't show Bayview's glorious summer color or its striking winter white. But they showed a Bayview that Linda ached to know and share. So she went to work.

The number of people without health insurance in North Idaho is higher than ever, but fewer of those people have to forgo medical care. A federal grant has let Coeur d'Alene's Dirne Community Health Clinic, formerly a volunteer-run near-free clinic, quadruple its monthly patient load from about 300 to 1,200. Nearly three-quarters of those patients are uninsured. The rest are on Medicaid or Medicare and couldn't find a doctor accepting new patients with their coverage. Or they have health insurance with high deductibles.

No taro or bananas grow in Plummer, and warm sea breezes are as rare as palm trees. Still, Samoan Sefo Laumatia fits right in to North Idaho's Indian country. "We don't stick out as much on the reservation," says Laura Laumatia, Sefo's wife and the mother of their 2-year-old triplets, Justine, Jacob and Grace. "People are so welcoming. This is the best possible location."

LANE MATZKE, 3, CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT'S IN THE BOXES stacked up in his living room. But he knows his desert camouflage helmet is appropriate headwear around the boxes. "He wore his helmet when we went to pick up coffee for the soldiers," his mom, Kim Matzke, says, smiling as Lane's brother, Garrett, 2, slips on his Army-green helmet. Their helmets match their dad Shawn's U.S. Army National Guard uniform dangling from a hanger above the boxes. The uniform constantly reminds Shawn, 27, that he's not with his infantry unit preparing to leave for Kuwait at the end of the month. Instead, he's home recovering from four kidney stones that provoked military doctors to deem him combat inefficient. The stones are gone now, but Army doctors worried they could return. Shawn was honorably discharged for medical reasons in April, just seven months after he joined the service.

NICHOLAS ASHBY'S dark future brightened this week when he left his home in Orofino for a bone-marrow transplant in Salt Lake City. Nick, 3, is one of seven people in the United States with congenital erythropoietic porphyria, known among laymen as werewolf's syndrome. Sun or bright light causes the cute blond toddler's skin to erupt in flesh-eating sores that look like chickenpox. Nick's body produces hair to protect his skin. His adult teeth will grow in black. A clash of his mom and dad's chromosomes sparked the extremely rare syndrome that kills children by age 5. A bone-marrow transplant that would replace all Nick's red blood cells, which produce the disease, is his only hope for a normal life.

THE VIETNAMESE MAN'S FACE meant little to Atsuko Schlesinger, but his words erased nearly 30 years of heartbreaking wonder. Atsuko, who lives in Coeur d'Alene, met Thanh Jeff Gahr late last month at a World Airways reunion in Oakland, Calif.

The woman whose stroke left her permanently speechless found a friend in Russ Patterson.The stroke hadn't impaired anything but her speaking ability. She could hear when people spoke to her, but she couldn't respond easily. Conversations were out, until Russ entered the scene. He pulled a telephone device for deaf people – TTY – from his cabinet at the Coeur d'Alene Public Library, where part of Russ' job is to demonstrate and lend to the public devices that help hearing.

Coeur d'Alene's Human Rights Institute is one step closer to existing thanks to Panhandle State Bank. The bank also can take at least partial credit for North Idaho College's new health sciences center, scholarships to NIC, the Coeur d'Alene Public Library's future new home and a water life discovery center in Sandpoint. Thanks to Panhandle State Bank, the blossoming art park at Harding Family Center is about to sprout with more color, energy and creativity.

Dr. Bob Holman excised my mother's breast cancer last month as neatly as Mom freed apples of bruises when I was a kid. Her mastectomy – breast removal – took hardly more than an hour at Kootenai Medical Center. Three hours after Dr. Holman reported to my dad and me that he'd removed her golf-ball-size tumor and the cancer apparently hadn't spread, Mom was wide awake and appreciating the hospital's blood pressure machine. She falls prey to white-coat syndrome – her pressure rises when a nurse measures it holding her arm. The syndrome apparently is absent when a machine does the measuring.

LAKE CITY PLAYHOUSE'S fall schedule surprised and delighted Bob Casemore as he read it in the newspaper. The play he'd written, "Back to the Blanket," was scheduled for a performance at Coeur d'Alene's Brix restaurant today. He didn't remember hearing that the Playhouse planned to produce his play. But he had no complaints. He was curious, however, about the timing of the production of his political comedy.