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...

When we were little, Mom read stories to us kids at bedtime and told stories of various events from her childhood. She was a keen observer of the human condition and told us about local happenings in our neighborhood and the little village of McFarland, Wisconsin, where we grew up.

Independence Day is always a hot time in the throes of summer, especially here in Arkansas. But I remember an especially “hot” celebration at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock on July 6, 1991, as a huge shower of glowing orange embers brought a spectacular ending to a patriotic celebration.

The 56th annual Wildwood Days takes over Rio Dell July 30-Aug. 2, with parades, cookoffs, softball, bocce, firefighter competitions, a soapbox derby and much more. Started in 1970, the festival is a celebration of small-town summer in Humboldt County. Thursday, July 30, features the BBQ competition on the Rio...

Every Sunday afternoon through August, come enjoy live music in the great outdoors at the Humboldt Botanical Garden 2026 Summer Music Series.

Edith Sachs and Alfred “Henk” Pennekamp were German refugees when they met in exile in Belgium in 1935 or 1936. They were married in 1940 in Lewisburg, New Jersey, just weeks after Henk’s — my father — surprise release from a French concentration camp for German and Austrian anti-fascists, intellectuals and J...

I was born at 7 p.m. on July 4, 1949 — 77 years ago. In the U.S., about 900,000 others have July 4th birthdays, so I’m not unusual. After all, there also are about 900,000 people in the U.S. who were born in Colombia. About 900,000 people live in Austin, Jacksonville or San Jose. About 900,000 Toyota Corollas...