Adventures in Restoration By Mary Terra-Berns You have got to be kidding me,” I said to myself as I scanned the absolute mess just off Highway 2, about a mile east of Priest River. In the summer of
When It was Really Cold By Marylyn Cork Photos Courtesy of Marylyn Cork As I walked into my Priest River pharmacy on a snowy day during Christmas week 2015, a longtime resident greeted me with a beaming smile
I’m almost forty. I feel much younger, but realize I am not. I love the hunt, chasing whitetails with my dad in the steep, green mountains of northern Idaho. I respect the game, and to me harvesting a deer is personal. Continue reading
My friend Diane Mercer was a little bit of a thing, a petite bundle of energy and know-how, as busy as a hummingbird. From the time she took up residence in my hometown of Priest River in 1986 until she died twenty-eight years later, the projects and activities she took on for the betterment of the community, while also operating a business of her own, were truly amazing. Continue reading
A few months shy of the first anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, an event that affected the central Washington town where I lived, I persuaded a friend to accompany me on a road trip to northern Idaho, where I’d been invited for a job interview.
It was the spring of 1981, and news of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan filled the interior of my small car as we pulled up in front of the Sandpoint Bee’s office. Inside, reporters scrambled for a local angle on the news.
At that point, my only experience in journalism was an internship on a paper in Moses Lake, Washington. I was a late bloomer—thirty-eight, and the mother of three teenaged kids. After two hours with editor Bruce Botka, he offered me the job, but added, “By the way, would you mind driving another twenty miles northeast to visit the Priest River Times’ office?” Continue reading
On a June day in 1982, I came home from my maternal grandmother’s funeral to find a scraggly little American Redbud tree blooming in my front yard for the first time since I’d planted it there several years earlier. The tree had been a gift from Grandma, who’d heard me say I’d like to have such a tree, and had gone out and bought it for me. It had never flourished and I’d given up on it and decided to let it die that summer. It did just that, but first it bloomed, paying tribute, I have always believed, to the memory of a remarkable woman. Continue reading
