A decade ago, it was called the Christmas miracle. Now, Vashon Community Care — rescued nearly overnight when Islanders rallied several years ago and raised enough money to keep it from shutting its doors — is looking for another remarkable Vashon moment.
As an historian of the American West, I confess that I stand in awe of Clint Eastwood’s body of work. He has crafted some of the most indelible images associated with that unending font of significance that Americans call “the frontier.”
Our whole family is hoping that our Vashon friends and neighbors will join us and vote to approve Referendum 74. We strongly support every Washingtonian’s right to marry whom they love and choose to share their life with. Let people be happy; it is the right thing to do.
The bedroom furniture casts short shadows in the muted gray of late June. I hot-potato hop on one leg, a few flecks of shredded grass still stuck to my shins, pulling on a pair of khaki pants. My hands throb from nettle stings as I gingerly slip a dress shirt over sunburned shoulders.
We at the Vashon Theatre have spent the better part of a decade getting to know this place and getting to know so many of you. Things are really different here. Adults step outside the box. So many of you are lifelong learners, travelers, ageless athletes, artists and community-minded individuals. You play and participate in adult versions of spelling bees, pinewood derbies and trick-or-treating.
King County made the right move in ending its misbegotten rumble strip project on Vashon.
Washington’s open public meetings act, passed by the state Legislature in 1971, begins with a strongly worded preamble.
News that the Church of Great Rain may remake itself — or even go away altogether — is sobering for those of us who have come to love this sardonic, off-kilter, homegrown variety show.
One of the things I love about Vashon Island is the easygoing sense of acceptance, or at least tolerance, and the way drivers slow down and give a wide berth to cyclists, dogs and runners. Have you come to expect the freedom to go about your business, relaxed and joyfully pursuing your own unique vision for yourself and the community where you live? Well, so had cyclists, but that has been taken away by the installation of rumble strips, those long stretches of grooved pavement that now mar our shoulders and the center line.
Criticizing King County is a sport on Vashon, and every now and then, it’s an understandable preoccupation. No government is perfect, and certainly not Seattle-based King County. But those who think it’s an absentee government paying scant attention to the Island should take a closer look at this week’s paper.
In June, I agreed to work with a group of community tutors who would help students in English. I believed that the assignment involved advising the tutors so that they could help struggling students be better prepared for next year’s classes. When I later discovered that one aspect of this summer program was to alter grades that students earned in the past academic year, based on their work with the volunteer tutors, I respectfully informed Vashon High School Principal Susan Hanson that I could not in good conscience participate in that effort. I believe it is neither educationally valid nor ethical for a student’s grade to be changed after a class has ended, based on work done primarily with a volunteer tutor. Here’s why.
While much of the country has faced scalding temperatures for the past month or so, we in the maritime Puget Sound region finally got our taste of summer. And what a sweet taste it’s been.
The harbor slumbers at sunup like an ageless debutante still asleep in her sequined party dress, each murmuring wave a measured breath, kelp and seaweed splayed across the gravel beach like strands of hair on a feather pillow.
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