Tom Lutey

No patient of Wesley Stone's ever had to worry about "Dumpster diving," that is the risk that some felon routing through the dentist's trash would steal their identity. Stone, it turns out, seldom threw anything away, a comforting assurance to those who allowed him to finger their bicuspids, a maddening reality for Mrs. Stone who put up with the clutter.

Now comes the time when frost releases its icy grip on all things poking from the ground, and backyard fences battered by winter winds buckle like punch-drunk fighters. Kevin Ch'en looks at these torn seams of suburbia and sees a chance to make things right. He frees the sun-bleached planks of a Spokane Valley privacy fence from their rotten frame and sets them aside. He drives thick metal down the spines of teetering posts to give them enough backbone to stand upright.

It's been a bad month for pit bulls. Coeur d'Alene is thinking about banning them. Horse lovers everywhere are cursing them five weeks after two of the dogs took down an aging racehorse in Spokane Valley. And now this: Two pit bulls four blocks from home were shot to death by Spokane Valley police after killing a cat and charging officers.

Amid the growl and blue smoke of a running chain saw, firefighter trainees Kevin Helt and Shawn Heath scaled a slick plywood roof, stomping out the surface before them with a fireman's ax. They were decked out in fire gear, thick rubber boots, heavy pants and coats designed to keep them from baking like potatoes in a burning building. The helmets ratcheted to their heads weighed against their necks as they worked their way up a ladder pitched flat against the plywood. They wore breathing masks and oxygen bottles strapped to their backs that quickly were running out of air.

Austin Bauman – that's Austin with an "i" like the city, not Austen with an "e," like the last name of Jane the English novelist – comes from a family of gifted spellers. Since 1999, a Bauman has represented Centennial Middle School at the Spokane Valley Spelling Bee in every year but one. Austin, 20, was the first. Katelyn Bauman, 12, because she's the West Valley family's youngest child, is last. The seventh-grader made her first Spokane Valley Spelling Bee appearance last week at Bowdish Middle School.

A massive piece of the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge is stranded at the Washington/Idaho state line where officials say it's too heavy to move across Evergreen State roads. The 73-foot-long piece, used to connect the bridge to land, tipped the scales at 330,000 pounds when it rolled through the Washington weigh station Saturday. The weigh-in includes the tonnage of the custom-built trailer carrying the structure.

Last Thursday, as Steve Primmer walked through Mount Hope Cemetery, the air smelled as if the spring rains had finally scrubbed away the winter residue. His boot heels sank a good inch into the saturated soil, which couldn't push the green grass up fast enough to compete with the low-slung clouds overhead. Spring at the cemetery is all about gently bringing the ground out of its winter stupor. There are headstones in need of righting after being knocked this way and that by buckling frosts and soil-softening thaws. There are wheel ruts to be filled in where a backhoe left the ground unapologetically crushed.

At times stray dogs in Sandy Lampe-Martin's neighborhood have been such a problem that the Edgecliff resident and her husband have baited a cage in the back of their pickup to collect them. There were the two brindle pit bulls the couple found roaming their neighborhood a month ago. Good dogs, Lampe-Martin said, but very much out of place considering their home was more than a mile away and separated by Interstate 90 and the seven lanes of East Sprague Avenue. Earlier this week, it was a trio of strays, a cocker spaniel, collie mix and some odd breed of big dog, weighing well over 100 pounds with a head shaped like a square-pointed shovel. The three knocked over garbage cans and generally scared small children and the elderly.

From the new gas pumps at the Sullivan Road Fred Meyer, to the curbside Walgreen's in Millwood's Argonne Plaza parking lot, smaller stores are growing like dandelions in big retail's vast parking lots. And that might not be a bad thing in the eyes of urban planners trying to cap urban sprawl. Pad development, as it's known, involves cutting new business lots into the blacktop outside shopping centers and big box retail, which clusters businesses on a single site and can partly cut down on driving.

It was a scene ripped from the script of "Extreme Makeover" last week as experts laid out their plans to revitalize Sprague Avenue to Spokane Valley city officials. Designers called for trees on Sprague Avenue, a downtown on the city's main drag where it intersects with University Road, and traffic and design changes literally for six miles from Interstate 90 to Sullivan Road.

Outside Kelley's Thrift in the tiny Palouse town of Fairfield, the street is so quiet you can hear the sky turn blue, which is soothing only if you're not Magdalena Kelley. Dressed well enough for Sunday church, with perfectly coifed hair and jeweled earrings, the matriarch of the town's only grocery kneels before a modest selection of shampoo bottles and restocks the shelves, waiting for the motion detector at the front door to peep. Ten minutes go by without a sound.

It's Tuesday at West Valley High School as a CD whirls and a narrator's voice fills Kamiel Youseph's portable classroom with the story of "To Kill a Mockingbird." In desks laid out like rows of corn, ninth-graders flip through pages of Harper Lee's story about coming of age and courage in the face of racial and class prejudice.

On the south bank of the Spokane River, just two miles west of the Washington-Idaho state line, stands a monument to 800 horses slaughtered by the U.S. Army. The interstate runs within a few hundred yards of it. The relentless moan of tractor-trailers and commuter cars plays a lonely soundtrack. The Centennial Trail practically brushes against the 8-foot granite slab.

Its windshield was shattered into a million pieces that still clung together in that strange way that auto glass does. And there were wet, rotten clothes spotted with mold on the floor in front of the passenger seat. But what told Ken Tadlock that this car had been left for dead was the way its front end was raised several inches higher into the air than its rear. Prying open the hood of the tired Mustang and peering in the engine bay, he found what he suspected – a fairly unobstructed view of the street below. The radiator and several other organs belonging to this 1983 Ford Mustang were missing.

It was no-tap bowling day at Valley Bowl on East Sprague Avenue and Dick Hubbard was stealing the show. He bowled strikes like his ball was the size of a Hoppity Horse and just couldn't miss. He bowled spares, leaving just one lonely pin teetering on the gutter's edge. And on his second try, he nailed that pin, too.

Across the mean streets of Spokane Valley, the wheels of justice turn slowly. The speedometer of Ray Westlake's retired cop car barely shows signs of life as the 68-year-old SCOPE volunteer pulls up to the handicapped parking stalls at Lowe's Home Improvement Center. He stops and turns on his amber overhead lights as his partner "Eagle Eye" Al Fisher reaches for an ever-slimming book of citations for handicapped-parking infractions.

It was Wednesday afternoon in a split level home on Drury Court in Liberty Lake, not long before Greg Wilcox's wife and children entered the final stretch of their drive home from day care – past manicured lawns and homes that list for $270,000, past everything the Wilcoxes like about The Cottages, an upper-middle-class network of cul-de-sacs. Greg, who works at home, was just finishing a late afternoon shower, just drying off when he heard the curtains come crashing down in his daylight basement.

Don't look now, South Hill, but you're getting ink done. Graffiti in 2006 left Spokane looking like a badly tattooed sailor.

The Edgecliff walking school bus doesn't have wheels that go round and round. Instead it scuds with the sound of children's winter boots marching through roadside gravel down the tired streets of a blue-collar neighborhood. Down 10th Avenue then Bradley Road, children leap from stubby concrete porches into the morning cold to catch "the bus" and greet its driver.

He'd strapped military equipment from parachutes and pushed them out of planes just to see how they'd land. He turned a summer internship with a high-tech icon into a lifetime career by simply refusing to recognize it was time to go home. It was no surprise then that when Harley Halverson stepped down from the often controversial Liberty Lake Sewer and Water District this week, he landed softly and admirably. His tenure on the board, which began as an agreement to fill a partial term, lasted 14 years.

It was scarcely above zero outside as Lisa Williksen's headlights cut through the darkness on Idaho Road. She turned down every cattle-guarded driveway, passed every no trespassing sign, ready to beg forgiveness and ask a favor: "Have you seen my dog?" Hulk, a 150-pound bull mastiff slipped through Williksen's front gate Jan. 10 along with Buddy, the family Great Pyrenees. Williksen had spent the first three days of the big chill searching her neighborhood in Liberty Lake, thinking the dogs couldn't have gone far, but then she got a call from a farmer four miles away on the Idaho state line. Buddy and Hulk had crossed the mountain ridge separating the two communities. Buddy was sleeping on the farmer's porch. Hulk had run deeper into Idaho.