Cynthia Taggart

MIRROR GLITTERS IN THE SUN from one wall and strange colorful beasts stand mid-prowl among the summer ryegrass. Brick structures unlike anything anywhere and random columns plated in a rainbow of broken tiles draw stares from passengers in nearly every passing car. A few drivers stop so they can examine the Harding Family Center's fascinating public art park. Barb Scarth and Kathy Colton wanted more to stop, so they provided a reason for those people who won't give in to their curiosity. They throw a summer festival with music, international foods, art, crafts and storytelling.

THE PACKAGE HAS GROWN on my dining room table for weeks. It began with photos – Victor Mas, 12, and William Sanchez, 11, showing me their crafts, Victor leaning against the door of his wood hut in southern Belize. My husband, Tom, and I had promised to mail the boys copies of the pictures we took. But snapshots didn't seem enough once we returned to Coeur d'Alene. Those boys had taken us out of our cozy existence and introduced us to a world we'd seen only on the Discovery Channel. They'd thrilled our senses and helped us understand that our definition of good living wasn't everyone's.

If every other face on Coeur d'Alene's streets seems to belong to a grandparent, you're not imagining anything. The senior population – people older than 59 – has exploded 43 percent in Idaho's five northern counties since the 1990 census, adding 10,110 senior residents to North Idaho's tax rolls. The growth rate is the fifth-fastest in the nation, and it's forcing senior citizens from the Canadian border to the southern end of the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation to wait for home-delivered meals, help with care and assessments of their needs.

The kids arrived in black, as Deon Borchard expected. Their noses, eyebrows and tongues were pierced. Black lipstick covered their lips. They were the kids so many people tried desperately to ignore rather than reveal discomfort at their appearance. But not Deon.

PARENTAL PRIDE PROMPTS MIKE AND BARB BRINTON to gush over Phil. It's nearly a sports event as they compete to list the teenage boy's activities – who has the best memory, can remember his most stunning accomplishment? It's hard to believe Philipp Bohnhof was with the Brintons for less than a year. The German boy who lives near Hanover returned home with his real parents in June after 10 months in Post Falls as the Brintons' surrogate son. But he's only physically gone.

Nurses at the North Idaho Cancer Center called in Cindy Shannon when a female patient on chemotherapy kept losing weight. Cindy is a social worker at the center. She chatted with the patient, trying to detect depression or emotional problems that would prompt her to stop eating.

PEGGY CAPES WAS CERTAIN she could accomplish just about anything with hard work. The brace on her left leg from her foot to her lower thigh was invisible to her. She'd worn it since 1948 when she was 3. Polio had hit her before her second birthday and it had left a big footprint. But Peggy was so young that its effects seemed normal to her.

ALL'S RIGHT WITH the world as far as Monty Danner is concerned. He's well aware of the continuing strife in the Middle East and horrors in Sudan. Monty's thinking on a smaller scale. One look at a moss-colored 95-year-old globe of the world in the corner of his library and he's at peace. After dozens of years in hotels and storage rooms, the globe that began its existence in Hayden Lake's Clark House is finally home where it belongs. "To see this beautiful piece in its proper surroundings and know it was a gift from a royal family …"

KELLOGG PEAK – Mountain bluebirds blend with a cloudless sky, but Naomi Barth spots them as she scans the Cabinet Mountains, then the Selkirks, Mt. Spokane and Frost Peak. Her eyes are sharp from practice. Barth spotted fires from Little Guard lookout tower up the Coeur d'Alene River for two summers, in 1972 and 1990. She stood on a wooden stool protected with insulators in the middle of the building while lightning cracked the night sky all around her and thunder rocked her elevated abode with an intensity she'd never experienced 4,000 feet below in town.

Tamara Wells didn't have to convince business owners to buy her benefit tickets even though they'd been hit up by every cause imaginable. "As soon as I told them the tickets were for Anna Meyer, they pulled out their money," Tamara says, grinning. She owns Tamara's Hair Studio in Hayden. "Everyone loves Anna."

THE MOOSE THUNDERED into Greg Torline's life at the right time. Greg crashed from ceiling to floor during a construction job in late January in Coeur d'Alene. He broke six ribs and his shoulder blade. He punctured a lung. His collarbone detached from his shoulder. Luckily, plenty of people were at the worksite. A call for help went out immediately. An ambulance hauled Greg to Kootenai Medical Center, where he spent two days in intensive care and a week under general watch. Doctors pried apart his ribs to insert a tube in his chest. The bones he broke had to heal without help.

THE TRAINING BEGAN in Buffalo, N.Y., at the neighborhood YMCA pool and the competitors were dead serious. No way was anyone going to beat them in canuggling this year. They would paddle their canoe back and forth across the pool and juggle all day if they had to. They planned to astonish the canuggling world when they reached Coeur d'Alene this summer. "I realized those people in Buffalo were not being silly about canuggling," says David Groth. He created the sport with silliness in mind two years ago on Lake Coeur d'Alene. "They were thinking of it as an athletic event."

DON'T BUY A DUCK DECOY off a store shelf without talking to Frank Werner first. The retired U.S. Marine in St. Maries is a duck psychologist, although he bills himself as an artist and boat builder. He knows how mallards land on water and what attracts them. He knows redhead ducks save spaces in their floating formation for other ducks and that wigeons are thugs. He knows canvasbacks, like all ducks, don't check details on floating ducks before they join the flock.

DOUG REED'S PRAYER is simple: "May you have food and shelter, a saddle for your head. May you be years in heaven, before the devil knows you are dead." He hears the words to music not yet written, but he'll write it soon. Doug, 62, knows he can now. He filled a CD with his words and music this year and people are buying it.

Remodeling old homes is a juggling act between what you want and what you can afford. Bill Currier just figured out how to stop juggling. He found his answer in a metal building stuffed with the castoffs from do-it-yourself stores and private home renovations. "This is my third visit," Bill says as he studies a used hot tub on display outside Habitat for Humanity of North Idaho's Recycle Store. "I bought a door last week. I'm looking at an oven. This place is on my regular route now."

LENY AND RAY INVERNON occasionally mute their television and open their windows to hear the splendid sounds of the North Idaho wilderness that surrounds their Naples home. "Ha, ha. Ha, ha, hee, hee, hee."

SANDPOINT – It's time Sandpoint raised its voice, and Yontan Gonpo is trying to make that happen. Gonpo and three friends are the movement behind Panhandle Community Radio Inc., a potential nonprofit local radio station for the people and by the people.

Lon Breitenbach was on his way to Hawaii's Ironman, at least in his head. He'd swum the 2.4-mile course in Ironman Coeur d'Alene in 53 minutes. He was the 19th person out of the water. And he was flying on his bike. Lon, No. 212, was having a good race, and it was lucky because the remaining Ironman races before Hawaii were sold out. If Lon didn't qualify in Coeur d'Alene, he was out of luck for this year. He was about 82 miles into the 112-mile bike course, heading around a corner that ends a long curvy stretch of downhill, when the race was over suddenly for him. He didn't crash. The rider just ahead of him had, and Lon was the first person to see him.

Dave Clemons just wanted to have fun, and Spokesman-Review readers appreciated that attitude. They voted Dave's Little Deuce Moose the favorite of the 26 moose in the EXCEL Foundation's No Moose Left Behind project. They liked "the taillights on the fanny," according to one voter in her senior years, and the yellow flames spreading over the moose's red body. They liked the headlight eyes and car-grill muzzle, tire-like hooves and the moose mug-shot on the haunches.