Opinion

From visits with the House and Senate Capitol Investment Committees to securing funding to repair and expand several miles of trail, the Friends of the Casey Jones State Trail has been making significant headway over the last year. While we’re building momentum, we’re looking for community support and volunteers to help accelerate progress on the Casey Jones State Trail.

Frazzled, ROB rushes into the coffee shop, immediately recognizes FATHER TIME on the opposite side of the café, sitting in a booth. Rob crosses to him quickly and sits.

Since the start of the pandemic and it's impact on small businesses, the push for shopping small has completely shifted my priorities for not only what I can do for local communities but also environmentally, with following a 90/10 rule for sustainable purchasing.

Something I have been thinking about lately is the complexity of feminism and the idea of empowerment. Every woman makes the negotiation in the morning on how she wants to be perceived. Whether that is covering up to be taken more "seriously" or to capitalize on their image while moving through a male dominated society.

When I started my career, I lived in California. I grew up in Sacramento, a town of 1,000,000. I later moved to a small town up north, Redding. Redding was a town with a population of 100,000 where the shock of living in such a “small town” was difficult to adjust to. In these towns, I’ve worked around journalism for the past 25 years. I have always loved journalism. It is the reason I sought my first job in newspapers (accounting), just so I could be near the printed word in the hopes that maybe someday, my words could be on the page.

When I was growing up in the early 1980s, we had a weekly newspaper in our town. There was a woman assigned to cover our little neighborhood. I remember her calling each week to ask my mother what was new in our family. Did Jeremy make the honor roll this quarter? Had we gone on vacation recently? Did we get a new pet? She would take this information from anyone in the neighborhood who was willing to share it and would write a column each week. When the paper came out on Wednesdays, my mother was always excited to read what was going on in the neighborhood. Everyone on our street knew each other. We played outside with the kids every day until dusk. My parents were in a bowling league with our neighbors. We had a block party in the street in the summer. When a new family moved in everyone welcomed them and introduced themselves. I guess you could say it was a great community.

Sometimes it’s good to think about the relationships that we have with others. We think about if those relationships are strong or not and whether or not we want to try to strengthen them, or if we want to end them. For many of us, having good relationships is an important part of our lives, our well-being, and our spiritual health also. I say it’s important for our spiritual health because there is no relationship that is more important than the relationship that we have with our God. But, even as I say that relationships are important, I also think we should remember that even more important than relationships are people.