Pia Hallenberg

In West Central’s Cannon Park, the passing of the city’s pool bond meant the replacement of a worn-down, leaking pool with a new pool, complete with slides and other water toys. But to make room for the new pool, it also meant the small yet heavily used basketball courts had to be torn down. “There was no money in the pool bond to replace the courts,” said Brenda Corbett, chairwoman of the West Central Neighborhood Council, “but we just couldn’t be without basketball courts.”

It began as a simple desire to add a water feature to the backyard. Almost 2,600 pounds of cement later, a beautiful pyramid reached toward the sky, in the shade of tall pines, conifers and a volunteer sumac. And then the water feature grew into a koi pond, with a circulating waterfall and a little bridge from where to watch the fish. Linda and Kevin Fairhurst’s amazing garden just off University Road, on 35th Avenue in Spokane Valley, hides behind a typical 1970s style house on a very typical Spokane Valley street, but there are many reasons why it’s part of the Spokane in Bloom garden tour that’s being put on this Saturday by the Inland Empire Gardeners.

It was hot at the end of Mt. Baldy Lane last week. It was so hot that the trampled dirt around Mikalai Belavus' construction site had turned into a powder as fine as flour, blowing here and there with every little wind gust. Yet the heat didn’t deter Belavus or the dozens of volunteers who were hammering away at his Habitat for Humanity house. “Every day I come out there is something new done on the house,” said Belavus, on June 3. “On Monday, it was just the foundation – and now look at this. I worked on the roof yesterday.”

They came from all over the country to meet in the shade of the pines, by the big soccer goal on Roosevelt Elementary School’s sports field. Many had not seen each other since the last time they were at Roosevelt, 50 years ago, as part of the graduating class of 1959. “It took a lot of Googling to find everybody, and sometimes Google said to go to Yahoo and ask,” said Joyce Eltz, who now lives in Eugene, Ore., but was one of the people who set out to get her elementary school class together for a 50-year reunion.

This year’s Hillyard Chalk Art Walk fell on the one blustery day of the week, but that didn’t deter the artists. More than 130 people crouched and kneeled on the Market Street sidewalks Saturday, drawing everything from puppies to solar systems to ninja turtles and skateboarders. “We are just hoping the rain won’t get here,” said Desi Bucknell, treasurer of the Hillyard Festival Association, one of the many neighborhood volunteers who helped put the event together. “It was tough finding a theme for this year, but we picked Hillyard’s Future.”

Solomon Shanko, 18, landed in Spokane in August 2007 after a 28-hour flight from his native Ethiopia. His mom had moved to the United States in 2002 – while Shanko stayed behind with his father, a sister and a brother. Today, Shanko’s siblings also live here, but his dad is still in Ethiopia. “He watches out for my grandparents; they are blind,” Shanko said, sitting in the library at Ferris High School. “And he works at the hospital. He was a nurse, then he went to university for two years, and now he’s between a doctor and a nurse.”

Brandon Leliefeld, 18, sits in the cafeteria of Deer Park High School on a Tuesday after school. Blue-eyed and already a little sunburned, he’s watching his friends leave in the dusty wind outside. Leliefeld is Deer Park High School’s notable student of the year and he’s just a tiny bit shy talking about that.

For the 19th year in a row, the Inland Northwest Blood Center has launched its summer blood drive with the release of a new T-shirt. From Memorial Day through Labor Day, donors get a T-shirt as a thank you when they donate.

For the 19th year in a row, the Inland Northwest Blood Center has launched its summer blood drive with the release of a new T-shirt. From Memorial Day through Labor Day, donors get a T-shirt as a thank you when they donate.

The classroom at HOPE School looks like most other preschool classrooms: sweet potatoes are sprouting on the windowsill, the betta fish swims around in its aquarium and a couple of caterpillars are growing big and fat in a little plastic dish. Today’s topic is seeds and how different plants grow from different seeds. Gathered around teacher Amy Hardie and instructional assistant Jennie Wheaton are five preschoolers working on their daily “jobs” – learning the calendar, singing out the names of the months, figuring out what the weather is like outside and taking attendance.

They get in on the ground level every time a park needs new floodlights or an intersection needs a full stop sign. They show up for Saturday morning cleanups and Wednesday night chili feeds. They make newsletters and run Web sites, testify at city council meetings and rally the troops by raising awareness about new developments where they live. They are volunteer neighborhood activists, and Jerry Numbers is just one of hundreds here in Spokane.

Kara Nelson, a fourth-grade teacher at Logan Elementary School, was watching “The Oprah Winfrey Show” one day. On the show was a segment about a program called “Challenge Day” – a day when teenagers, parents and teachers challenged each other to do better, not necessarily in scholastic sense, but by being more accepting, kinder and more supportive of one another. “I took some of that program and made it for elementary level,” said Nelson, who’s in her second year of teaching fourth grade at Logan. “It’s a program that Logan has created.”

The bulbs planted last year by the Associated Garden Clubs of Spokane are blooming just in time for the opening of the Moore-Turner Heritage Gardens this weekend. Two dozen volunteers cleaned up the gardens in late April, and now visitors can once again enjoy the beautiful views of downtown Spokane, as perennials, shrubs and trees come back to life after a taxing winter.

It was the night before Bloomsday, and rain was falling gently in the South Perry neighborhood. Neighbors gathered on the west side of the street for a party. The Lantern tavern opened on South Perry last Thursday, and Saturday evening the place was hopping as much as possible in the tiny storefront that formerly was home to the Pop Shoppe.

Students, parents and teachers were met by a rather unusual sight when they walked into Jefferson Elementary School the evening of April 29. Right there in the hallway, a cow eye was being dissected, to the delight of squirming kids who couldn’t get close enough to the action, and to the disgust of most parents who were lined up against the wall, refusing to look.

When 50,000 runners and walkers reach for water during Bloomsday, they leave quite a few paper cups behind. In previous years, cleanup crews have swiftly removed the trampled cups as the race wound down, but this year the used cups aren’t going in the trash: They will be recycled.

Years ago, when neighbors got together for the first time to clean up Palisades Park, they hauled out 22 tons of garbage, building debris, old toilets and car parts. Last Saturday, when residents from the neighborhood around the west Spokane park gathered once again to fill trash bags and pickup beds, they expected maybe 1 ton. “We get together once a year, always around this time, and we clean up,” said Vic Castleberry, chair of the neighborhood association. “Today, the Parks Department helps us out a lot, but when I came to this area in the 1970s, I think they’d forgotten that they even had it.”