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Bravo for last week’s articles and letters regarding the pharmacy benefit managers and the unfortunate closure of La Conner Drug Store, which is such a tangible example of rural America being at the mercy of big money and corporate capitalism. I too had a small business in La Conner. Luckily it still prospers, but I remember fighting to get medical insurance companies to recognize a small independent physical therapy clinic. They kept telling me that they had enough service in Mt. Vernon and Anacortes. What happened to small individual capitali...
The Skagit Valley Clean Energy Co-op (skagitvce.coop) is ramping up our Solarize Skagit Campaign which will start in early March 2024. SVCEC’s Solarize Campaign connects Skagit homeowners and small businesses with solarizing their homes and buildings with the benefit of volume purchasing. We are a non-profit run by volunteers writing grants and mobilizing the money available from various government entities that can cut solarizing costs with free analysis of your roof site, tax credits, group purchasing discounts and financial discount on l...
Grace Hubbard's 100th birthday celebrated last week in the Weekly News reminded me of the sister cities project we worked on together in the early 1980s. Grace has an excellent memory, which helped to jog mine. So I'm adding to her story. I had returned from Peace Corps in the Fiji Islands a decade previously and birthed my first baby. Ronald Reagan was president, which worried some of us as to the saber rattling with the Soviets. I went to a Peace Corps reunion that was electric with creative...
Decades ago, each March as the northwest mystic sky started to show the sun through cracks in the clouds, we were tempted to get on our bikes and pedal around the farm roads to see how the daffodils, tulips and irises were progressing. The colors were spectacular. Rows of intense yellow daffodils striped the fields. And later in April the valley’s tulips displayed patchwork quilts of peachy orange sewed to fiery red sewed to deep purple. Our spring bike trips never disappointed. One year, 1...
As I write this, my eyes are burning from the smoke of west coast fires, my daughters are planning evacuation routes in the Portland area and COVID-19 is taking a huge toll on our health and psyches. It is hard to imagine the pain of people losing their homes and all they have built up in their lives. The world’s attention is now focused on the COVID-19 pandemic as if it stands alone while climate change has faded to the back burner. But, unfortunately, climate change is still an existential threat that is increasing disease vectors such as C...
Who remembers this picture? October 1983. The cold war was churning with Ronald Reagan at the helm, but Mikhail Gorbachev was not yet on the scene. I had returned from the Peace Corps a decade before, but the international spirit was still alive in me. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were high, threatening mutual nuclear annihilation. I was a new mother with a two-year-old and pregnant with a second child. I didn’t want to see my babies grow up in a world saturated w...
