The old folder lurked in the back of my storage shelves. Thirty years had passed since I had filled it with papers found among my mother’s things. My aunt had convinced my mother to write a story about the cats she had when she was a child. Was this it? She had used a pencil and whatever scrap paper was avail...

Maggie is a Boston Terrier/Chihuahua mix who lives with Gisela Colbert at Timber Ridge in McKinleyville. She is 17½ and has been Gisela’s constant companion since she was an even tinier puppy.

Humboldt’s own Obon Festival brings Japanese Buddhist tradition that is over 1,400 years old to Arcata’s Creamery District on 9th Street in August with a dazzling wealth of performances, activities and other attractions to honor the spirits of our ancestors. The 2026 annual festival on Sunday, Aug. 16, 3-7 p....

I’ll begin with 1975 — a jackrabbit roadkill, skinned and trimmed and three days in a marinade. Guests are invited to the feast. A silent form enters through the door, leaps onto the counter and then off, prompting Nancy to announce, “Your cat, I believe, is escaping with the hasenpfeffer.” That would have be...

Once upon a time, many years ago (1966), I worked on a dairy farm in Sussex, England. My two buddies, John and Paul (not THAT John and Paul!), had quit teaching agriculture to start a dairy. I was milking 75 Jersey cows a day. It was pretty exciting stuff for a city boy from Los Angeles. About 10 years later,...

Years ago, I went to Winco with Bella, our slim, greyhound-like pit bull, to pick up a few things for dinner. When I got back to the car, I realized I’d forgotten something, so I put the groceries in the back of the car, ruffed up Bella’s scuff a bit and went back into the store. On the way back to the car, a...

We are in the middle of a loneliness epidemic — in 2023, the U.S. surgeon general declared loneliness a public health crisis. Most of us feel it. We swipe, we scroll, we text and somehow we end up more disconnected than ever. I have felt it, and I knew I wasn’t alone.

The ongoing terrible news about a well-known animal rescue in Fortuna reminds us that Humboldt County teems with excellent, dependable, helpful, humane, responsive and responsible groups dedicated to helping pets and other animals. Here are some of them.

Mary, 97, can’t imagine life without Sam. “Sam is my best friend, the most loyal person ever to be in my life,” said Mary, who shares a suite at Timber Ridge Assisted Living in McKinleyville with her 13-year-old Golden Retriever, Samson. “I feel so safe with him at the foot of my bed at night.

My mom was in her 80s, still riding her horse on lumber company roads behind McKinleyville with her friend Carol Stewart, accompanied, as always, by her pack of hounds. That is, one actual hound and two small dogs who thought they were hounds. Their job was to sweep the trails for dangerous wildlife like moun...

The grid goes down, but this is no ordinary power outage. It’s a cyberattack. The scope is hard to assess, but it’s clearly widespread — national, maybe even global. Help could be weeks or months away.

In the early 1770s, American colonists became convinced that the English Parliament intended to take away their freedoms. In fact, the Americans saw a pattern of increasing oppression and corruption all around the world. Indeed, the British were determined to bring their unruly American subjects to heel and b...

I can still sing the battle songs of every branch of America’s armed forces. I am also usually the only person in our crowd who, when we gather around the Christmas tree, knows the words to the second verse of just about every Christmas carol. I went to public school, had no religious education, but I’m prett...

I learned two surprising things in putting together this special July 4th issue of Senior News on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The first concerned Betsy Ross, who — as everybody knows — sewed the first American flag. Or did she?

My father was only high school-educated, but he was an ardent student of the history of our nation who felt privileged to live in an historic city, central to the forming of our country — Philadelphia. When I was a young girl, in the 1940s and early ’50s, Dad would take me on Sundays by bus (we never owned a ...

We asked Senior News readers and others for their quick thoughts on this 4th of July. Here are some of the responses.

What America means to me, in the words of some of our Founding Fathers, all signatories to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

As we celebrate the 4th of July and the United States’ 250th birthday, I’m trying to remember if I was raised to be patriotic as a child. My recollection is like Arthur Krystal’s in a recent New Yorker magazine: “I did not grow up loving America — not because I thought it didn’t deserve love but because I did...

One of my great-great-greats was Benedict Arnold, which always made me feel a little sheepish about the quality of my inherited family patriotism. But my father’s family was longtime Yankee stock that had infested Western Massachusetts back to the early 1700s — slate headstones carved with the names of variou...

Like most kids growing up in the ’50s, I recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in class and sang “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful” in school assemblies. I was conditioned to believe that the United States was the best country — superior to any other because of our democracy, equality an...