Water Inspires, So Woman Runs With It

Loreen Howard likes water burbling, trickling, playing color games with the sun.

“I should be a big bird, I’m so attracted to running water,” she says, sinking to her knees to adjust a flat green rock in her miniature rose garden pond.

Loreen wanted to swing on her back porch east of Athol to the peaceful creek sound she longed to bring home from each camping trip.

But her home sits 500 feet from water. She knew she’d have to make her own creek. Last spring, Loreen began reading books on bog, water and rock plants, algae, ponds, pumps and soil compaction.

“We can’t afford to have a pond built,” she says. “But I feel that if it’s in a book, I can do it.”

She hired a backhoe to dig a crater, then she raked rocks and mounded dirt into a hill that overflowed half the hole. She planned for water to fall from the top of the hill to the pond where a pump would recirculate it.

Her son, a civil engineer, told her it wouldn’t work; she needed rock to keep her hill from sliding into her pond.

They found rusty orange and gray rock on the west side of Spirit Lake. Her son sunk the rock into the dirt hill in tiers. Loreen fitted rock into a channel for a waterfall.

She installed a liner and a pump in the kidney-shaped crater, filled it with water and listened contentedly as 3,000 gallons of water circulated each hour.

Loreen finished her masterpiece with a fine bark and flowers on the hill and water lilies, hyacinths and goldfish in the pond.

Friends admired her work enough to inspire her to try more. She designed a miniature rose garden with a green wrought iron bench to fit a Barbie doll, an ivy-covered arbor, a rock bridge over a bubbling creek and stepping stones to a cluster of tiny rose bushes.

Birds bathe in four bubbling ponds in her shady yard now and she can’t wait to start on her fifth: a tiny secluded Japanese tea garden where a stream will meander through bonsai trees, a teahouse and a pagoda.

“I get my ideas just before I wake up,” she says, smiling gratefully at a bird wading in her rose garden pond. “This is the funnest thing I’ve ever done.”

Loreen decided this month to open a pond-building business, Cedar Mountain Bird Ponds. The money isn’t as important to her as the opportunity to see her ideas at work.

“My cousin said, ‘You’ve raised your kids and God wants you to do something with your creative talents,”’ she says. “I’ve finally decided what I want to be when I grow up.”

Batter up

Little Silverton is the perfect place for the state’s Little League finals on Friday. The field is one of the best in the state thanks to volunteers. Susan Clement is one of 30 to 40 people out there before and after each game cleaning bleachers, pampering the grass and smoothing the infield dirt.

She says she works happily for her sons and because the local league starts off each year with a work party that includes hot dogs and soda pop for all volunteers. Looks like a little tender loving care paid off big time.

Tri the net

The Coeur d’Alene Triathlon is pretty high-tech, with titanium bikes and wetsuits so hydrodynamic they might as well have motors. This year, the triathlon and the Youth Triathlon have joined the Internet.

Brian Travis, son of Iron Man racer Bill Travis, created home pages free for each race. The pages include race history, race details, even applications. After the race, the home pages will run results.

Here’s the computer address: CDA Online.com/ triathlon.

What’s your favorite summer race in North Idaho? Sandpoint’s Long Bridge Swim? Wallace’s Huckleberry Run? Pant out the reasons to Cynthia Taggart, “Close to Home,” 608 Northwest Blvd., Suite 200, Coeur d’Alene 83814; fax to 765-7149; or call 765-7128.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo