Donations Brighten Up Cda Shelters

Happy New Year is no empty greeting to Cricket Green.

She’s so happy, she bubbles and even bounces.

“It feels like Martha Stewart has arrived,” she says, surveying the freshly painted and decorated living room of the St. Vincent de Paul’s women’s shelter in Coeur d’Alene.

“I can’t believe this community and the people who backed me.”

Two months ago, Cricket pleaded for help for the two homeless shelters she oversees. They were dingy and dilapidated. They reinforced the down-and-out attitude of the people who stayed in them.

Then, the Happy Family Club from Mica Grange and the Twin Lakes Village Women, the St. George’s Quilters and the Kootenai County Democrats stepped in. So did others.

Church groups and teachers, businesses and individuals opened checkbooks and supply rooms. Their generosity floored Cricket.

“Everything I asked for and more has come in,” she says.

Fresh white paint brightens the interiors of both shelters now. Chic mauve swags and flowered valances decorate the women’s windows. New, heavy-duty carpets cover every floor.

Shelter residents sleep on thick mattresses under colorful, handmade quilts on sturdy new bunkbeds. They store their belongings in new chests of drawers and cabinets and read by the light of fashionable new lamps.

The people who stay in the shelters, which numbered about 600 this year, must find work or leave. Cricket says the new surroundings as well as donations of haircuts, new underwear and transportation vouchers help to improve residents’ attitudes and confidence.

Between carpeting, furniture, paint, electrical and plumbing work, wall hangings, window coverings, bedding, linoleum, sinks and smaller donations, Cricket figures the community heaped about $25,000 of caring on her shelters.

“I’ve almost cried a couple of times,’ she says. “Can you believe this?”

Busted spirit

The Mullan post office failed Coeur d’Alene’s Thelma Anderson when it returned to her a Christmas card she’d sent to Mary Castaneda. Mary’s lived in Mullan for more than 40 years.

Thelma grumbles that Mullan’s post office should have known where to find Mary if Coeur d’Alene’s much bigger post office could get a wrongly addressed card to Thelma.

The card, from Thelma’s friend in Michigan, carried a six-digit address. Thelma’s has four numbers. But the holiday greeting showed up in her mailbox even though she’s lived at that address only three years.

“This little (Mullan) incident made my Christmas spirit plummet,” Thelma says. “Where do we report this?”

Right here.

Don’t drink and run

TESH’s annual Hangover Handicap run along Lake Coeur d’Alene is a good reason to control the alcohol intake on New Year’s Eve.

There’s no point making the effort to cover five miles at 9:30 a.m. if you can’t even see the lake steaming in the cold air. Regardless of your condition New Year’s morning, the Hangover Handicap is a good way to launch 1999.

The $15 entry fee goes to TESH’s training programs for disabled people. And the T-shirts are usually terrific. Call 765-5105 for an entry form.

Tiring traditions

When I was a kid, I stayed up just long enough to see in the New Year by banging wooden spoons on pots and pans on the front porch. As a teen, I danced in the New Year. As a young mother, I returned to the front porch pan-banging with my kids.

Now, I snooze through it.