Stefanie Pettit

Two recent news items have me thinking once again about the importance of cursive writing.

The Painter barn is easy to see from a distance. It stands tall out in the Palouse, some 16 miles southwest of Cheney. It has been there for 100 years and remains today what it has always been, a working barn.

Stefanie Pettit joins Facebook... and kind of likes it.

Of the many members of law enforcement buried in cemeteries in Spokane County, most have died of natural causes and some in the line of duty. And then there are the few who were assassinated, one of whom is former acting Spokane Police Chief John T. Sullivan, who was shot in the back in his own home in January 1911.

It was just a few weeks ago that I first cracked open some fresh-from-the-hen eggs for Sunday morning breakfast. They were medium-sized eggs from Miss Chicken’s 2015 group of babies, who were just beginning to lay.

Farewell to the beauty of language. As 2015 comes to a close and 2016 dawns tomorrow with its own new hopes and dreams, it’s official – the diversity and intricacies of our wonderful language have been deemed irrelevant and pronounced dead, officially.

There are many fine examples of stained glass windows in Spokane, including eight at the Mount St. Michael Chapel. And one of them, the panel dedicated to St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, has within it a bit of humor that wasn’t supposed to be there.

There were a lot of books and stories read to me when I was a child, but two remain sharp in my memory.

Journalists have been killed for the work they do or sometimes because they are caught in the line of fire in a war zone, but rarely are they killed for something that never happened.

Lo those many decades ago when I had just arrived in Spokane, I was a guest at someone’s home and asked if I’d like a pop. Well, I already had a pop who was living with a mom back home in Miami. However, I would like very much to have a soda, thank you.

I just hate it when a conversation with one of my sons begins with “Mom, I’ve got something to tell you. Don’t be upset.”

One of early Spokane’s most generous benefactors may be one of the least known. Col. David P. Jenkins does have an elaborate grave monument at Fairmount Memorial Park, and has one building in Spokane and one school in Chewelah named for him, but that’s pretty much it.

My husband got hearing aids last week, and both of our lives have gotten better since.

A good friend of mine is leaving the area, and though she hasn’t quite gone yet, I already miss her terribly. It’s hard when a really good friend moves away. Moving away is better, of course, than the other way I have lost good friends recently – through death – but it is still a loss.

With a certain degree of hope and confidence it can be said that Helen Keller planted this linden tree in Manito Park, and that tree is part of her legacy of peace and hope for all of us.

Stefanie Pettit was taken aback recently while waiting for a flight at the airport in Portland when a woman, probably in her 20s, walked by in her jammies. She had a big hoodie covering her upper half and flower-decorated pajama bottoms beneath.

More than 80 years later, no one knows who killed Dr. James I. Gaines in front of his South Hill home.

When architect Alfred Jones began building his dream home on Spokane’s South Hill in 1909, little did he know the family’s stay there would be short. They moved in when the house at 238 E. 13th Ave. was finished late in 1910 and moved out five months later, relocating to Arizona for health reasons. He had lost two children already to tuberculosis and was himself suffering from the disease.

It being the political season and all, I’ve been musing about situational outrage and how we engage in it over and over without ever seeming to feel any embarrassment. I thought we were smarter than that. Look at a couple of things in the headlines recently. Presidential candidate and businessman Donald Trump freely uses the term “anchor baby” in referring to children born on American soil to undocumented immigrants and receives a lot of praise and hardly a tsk-tsk. Yet fellow candidate Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and married to a naturalized American citizen who was born in Mexico, uses the term and – well, he’s still trying to quell the firestorm that followed. And they’re both in the same political party.

The gravestone at Greenwood Memorial Terrace with the fading lettering – “J.W. Proctor, U.S Soldier” – gives no hint about the interesting life of the 6-foot-6-inch, 190-pound gentle giant who lies beneath, a true character who inhabited Spokane in the late 1800s, striding about in his buckskin clothing, broad-brimmed white hat and general frontier attire. Nor does it indicate that John W. Proctor was known far and wide as Death-on-the-Trail or Death-on-Trail. That fierce-sounding name belied who Proctor was, a man who was described as generous to a fault and helpful to all. According to written accounts, he embraced the word “death” in its slang meaning as being proficient in one’s expertise, as in a dedicated physician who might be considered death on tuberculosis, for example.

So here I am with a delicious day and a half all to myself. What shall I do? My husband has gone with a friend to a Mariners game in Seattle, and the house is quiet. No pillows dropped on the living room floor. No Bruce obliviously standing at the kitchen sink rinsing out something gucky from the garage as I approach with a steaming pot of pasta needing to be drained. No need to interrupt what I’m doing to be sure he eats something (he goes without food unless there’s something edible directly in his line of sight).