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Lilac Festival was in Spokane a couple weeks ago. The lilacs are blooming with their sweet smell. The first weekend in May is the Apple Blossom Festival in Wenatchee. When the orchards are in full bloom in Wenatchee with the fruit blossoms, the landscape looks like a blanket of lace has been thrown over the orchards. I grew up in Olympia and at Easter, the Capitol Grounds are adorned with cherry blossom trees. They are just ornamental cherry blossoms, but they are beautiful. Growing up, my dad loved flowers and ornamental...
On Sunday, my husband and I went to Moses Lake to a fancy restaurant to celebrate our fifty-seventh wedding anniversary. We don’t eat at fancy restaurants very often, but this was a special occasion. I hate to say it, but after so many years, good food is appreciated, but not necessarily found exceptional. The special part is the fact I don’t need to cook and I enjoy having a special evening with my husband. But what surprised me, yet perhaps shouldn’t have; I looked at a number of the younger diners and they were on their...
I have a long history of canning. I grew up on a small farm and I can’t remember a time when my mother didn’t can garden produce in the summertime. I wonder how many thousands of beans I have snipped in my lifetime. I know as a child I felt helping with the canning was a chore, but we all had to help when Mom had canning to do. Green beans were the big thing; quarts and quarts of beans. We also cut corn off the cob so she could can it. We slipped skins from beets so she pickled them. We picked cucumbers for dill pickles. I g...
I bought a lottery ticket again. I know it’s foolish, but you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket. I’m not naive enough to truly believe I’m going to win, but I can dream, can’t I? Sometimes I feel like throwing caution to the wind and doing foolish things just for the fun of it. Is that a sin, or just a carefree indulgence? Perhaps you’ve heard the joke about the two farmers who came to a one lane bridge at the same time. The first farmer said, “I never back up for a fool!” The second farmer replied, “I always do,” and proce...
My name is Elvira Hokum but more frequently known as the Wicked Witch. I know the history books report Hansel and Gretel’s version of what happened in the deep dark woods on my property, but they lied. I want to set the record straight and tell what really happened. Hansel and Gretel had been at my house for about a month, but managed to find their way back home and reported everything to the local newspaper. But it isn’t true. This is what happened. Hansel and Gretel are brats who manipulate, deceive, and lie and eve...
A few years ago I attended a retirement party for a friend retiring from the railroad where he had worked for over 40 years. The dinner was good, and his co-workers provided good-natured ribbing at Blake’s expense. One coworker had been his partner for over 25 years. He told this story they both swear was true. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. Marvin and Blake were on their way to work driving down a rural road when they passed a deserted farm house nestled in a grove of trees. Suddenly Blake cried out, “Sto...
A while back I received a phone call that turned out to be a wrong number. The person calling didn’t have access to the phone book in our area, so I looked up the number for them. After I was done, I started flipping through the North Central Washington phone book and found some trivial points of interest I was surprised to see. I found a list of the Washington symbols. Many of them I already knew. For instance, I knew Washington is the only state named after a president. Its flower is the Rhododendron, and the bird is the Go...
