Stefanie Pettit

I would be a terrible spy. I’d also probably not be able to pull off an affair, tell a big fat lie or enter into a conspiracy involving serious duplicity. I’m just not cut out for it. I know this because I’ve been hiding something for the past month – hiding it from my husband, Bruce, and absolutely everyone I know, including my youngest son. I’ve skirted around it. I’ve told half-truths. I’ve even taking to intercepting the mail so that a particular letter I’ve been expecting lands in my hands, not my husband’s.

It’s somewhat unusual that a mid-20th-century house would qualify for listing on the Spokane Register of Historic Places, but then, not every 1950s house is like the one built by Joel E. Ferris II and his wife, Mary Jean. The house – unassuming from the outside – was designed by one of Spokane’s most renowned architects, Bruce Walker, and is considered such a fine example of mid-century modern residential architecture that it will be included in the tour of historic homes during the National Trust for Historic Preservation annual conference taking place in Spokane from Wednesday to Nov. 3.

The election is 19 days away. Like most of us, I expect, I’m sick of the commercials and incessant noise that surrounds the whole election process. Even so, I’m compelled to write a few words on Referendum 74, the equality in marriage measure. I’m for it. I know that a lot of people – people who are basically fair-minded and kind in nature – have trouble with it. But as I’ve thought about what marriage truly is and truly means, there are two couples who influence my thinking. They are in fact married, except that they’re not.

A little frost in the air, leaves taking on color, deer eating my flowers – the seasons are turning. And this, naturally, brings me to eggs and chickens. No, really. The Spokane County Interstate Fair concluded not long ago, after which I received some happy poultry news. I’ve been feeling a little blue of late, so tales of my favorite farm girls – Miss Chicken and her progeny – lifted my spirits a bit.

In the 1880s when the affluent among Spokane’s growing population were building stately homes in Browne’s Addition or Cannon’s Addition, a few of them ventured out to locate instead on oversized lots in an area known as Pettet’s Addition, just northwest of the city’s downtown core. The land on a steep bluff with a panoramic view of the Spokane River was first developed by William Pettet, founder of the Washington Water Power Co. Over time a mix of elegant homes reflecting many styles were built there – from Tudor revival to Queen Anne and others.

It happens in the best of families. The boy Declan celebrated his 14th birthday in August. A few weeks later – just last week, to be precise – he came home from school, opened the family’s locked gun cabinet, took out a gun and went into the bathroom of his home in East Wenatchee. His mother and a brother were in the house and, hearing a shot, went to see what had happened. A single bullet had been fired, that’s what happened, and the boy was instantly dead.

At my own peril for going there again, I once again bring up the topic of friendships dissolving over differences in political viewpoints. I do so because I have new (to me at least) information. I wrote on this subject two weeks ago, about how I’ve been unfriended after twice asking an old high school friend to stop sending me unsolicited third-party politically themed material. I was always glad to talk about things – her words and my words, even where we differed – but I didn’t want to be the recipient of unwanted material from other sources sent without her own insights accompanying them. That’s not a conversation; that’s a siege. She didn’t take kindly to that, and so I’m now out on an iceberg somewhere.

Sometimes you run across something so intriguing – in this case, part natural and part man-made – that you just have to find out about it. The something here is a 15-foot basalt outcropping that’s been whittled and augmented into a patio, garden and general object of interest. The mound all but blocks the house located behind it at 621 E. Seventh Ave., a house whose exterior was constructed from rock chipped from the mound. The project was started by then-owner Warren Brandt in the 1930s and took about 17 years to complete.

There is a water tower on Spokane’s South Hill that stands out as a work of art – and also the site of childhood memories. James McCloud, who grew up in Spokane but now lives north of Seattle, shares some of the latter. He recalled watching fighter planes flying by the tower on their way to Fairchild Air Force Base, when he was a boy some 60 or 70 years ago. The tower was quite a sight then – and remains so now.

My husband and I celebrated our 45th anniversary this month. It was a wonderful day for us – but like more things as we are getting older, it was tinged with sadness, too. I guess that comes along with making it to senior citizenhood. We booked a room at The Davenport and did downtown things – listening to the Harvey Phillips Northwest Big Brass Bash in Riverfront Park (who knew a group of tuba players could soar so mightily on everything from military service anthems to Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”?), seeing a movie, eating out and enjoying other fun things in our own city that we seldom do.

In the early 1900s when rail lines converged in Spokane to support the burgeoning agriculture, lumber and mining economies of the region, many brick buildings were constructed near the train tracks, providing space for industrial and commercial use on their main floors and apartments or single-occupancy rooms on upper floors. In 1911 the Green-Hughes Printing Co. Building at 19 W. Pacific Ave. became one of those commercial structures. Many of those buildings are still in use today as warehouses or multifamily dwellings, but this particular structure may have the distinction of having the most eclectic uses over the years, including being the home to a significant regional publication. And it stands today ready to become home to another of Spokane’s media enterprises.

I’ve discovered the delights of gardening. It’s only taken 60-odd years to be struck by sod, so to speak, but here I am. I always attributed my indifference to yardy things to my relatively urban upbringing, plus the fact that my parents didn’t have any particular affinity for it. Oh sure, my dad made sure our small lawn got watered and mowed, but that was pretty much it – though we certainly enjoyed the mangos that dropped from our neighbor’s huge tree. I mean, if it falls on our lawn, it’s ours, right?

CLAYTON, Wash. – If it weren’t for the actions of a group of citizens who cared about the heritage of their community, the old Clayton School would have remained a derelict building. Or worse. The Clayton School, at the corner of Swenson Road and Park Avenue in Clayton, just north of Deer Park on Highway 395, opened in 1915. It is one of the few structures left from the thriving days in Clayton, when the Washington Brick & Lime Co. operated a manufacturing plant there.

Today is Flag Day. Father’s Day is just three days off. And, frankly, after performing my own little memory ritual recently, I find that these two celebrations fit together quite nicely. When I was little, we lived in New York City, where I was born. My mother was born in the Bronx, the daughter of immigrants. My father was born in Germany and in the mid-1920s came to America and proudly became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

There was a time not all that long ago when tuberculosis was a leading cause of death, so much so that sanitoriums opened across the nation to isolate and treat patients. The last TB sanitarium in the state of Washington was Edgecliff Hospital in Spokane Valley. The hospital, located on a 12-acre campus at 601 S. Park Road, closed in January 1978. New antiviral drugs and political action in the state helped bring about its closure, said Dr. George Rodkey, the facility’s medical director from 1957 to 1978.

Several years ago when I was back home in Miami, I stopped by the cemetery where my father is buried. Though I go to Florida reasonably often, I don’t usually visit the cemetery there, but it occurred to me that maybe I should, if just to check on things. It had been decades since my last cemetery visit, so when I got there, a lot of the features I remembered weren’t there anymore. The hedge was gone. The little pond was gone. I couldn’t find my father. I panicked. I’d read about nefarious things that can go on in the mortuary/cemetery business, and I envisioned my father dug up, discarded and his plot resold to someone else.

When Crystal Burrows speaks, it’s with a soft voice. The On Track Academy senior doesn’t complain, but when asked about things, she will tell you, in quiet tones, beginning with the vastly understated observation that “I didn’t grow up in a perfect home. It was kind of tough.” There was drug abuse, and she lived in terror that the home would be raided. She was raped by her stepfather when she was in sixth grade.

There are all kinds of stereotypes. If you’re a pageant contestant or an athlete, a good student or a cheerleader, you’re supposed to fit a certain mold, right? Not so for Melissa Stenslie, 18, who is graduating from Deer Park High School along with her twin sister, Rebecca.

Gina L. Myers knows what’s cooking. She is. Myers, who graduated a semester early from Ferris High School this past December, has been cooking, literally and figuratively, most of her life – from actually creating in the kitchen to reaching forward with zest to the next thing in her life.

When Cheryl Kettrick first encountered Jamal Davis, now a senior in West Valley School District’s Contract Based Education program two years ago, it was at Abstemious, an out-patient drug and alcohol treatment center in Spokane. “I immediately thought that here was a wonderful person who needed some help,” said Kettrick, owner of A to Z Rentals in Spokane.

Amanda Allen, 17, has had a busy, wonderful and traditional high school experience at Lakeside High School, where she has earned a 3.76 grade-point average. Traditional, except for one thing, that really big thing that happened on a cold day in December a few years ago. “I remember exactly,” she said. “It was Dec. 14, 2008, the coldest day of the year. Our house was out in the country. Thank God we weren’t home. Our house caught fire and it burned to the ground. It was so cold that the water in the tanks of the fire trucks froze. All that was left was the garage and the foundation of the house.”