By Ashley Lodato
This comes a little too far on the heels of Halloween to be timely, but it’s too good not to share. When students in Tiffany Surface’s fourth-grade class wrote Halloween poems, Sterling Konrad began his with a real zinger of a first verse:
The costumes are scary:
Witches, skeletons, clowns, teachers.
Nooooo! Not those scary teachers! It must be some small consolation to teachers, however, to learn that they rank less frightening than clowns, which everyone knows are the absolute scariest.
If it’s a little too late for Halloween reporting, it’s also a little too early for Christmas tree stories. So I won’t go there yet, but in the interest of full disclosure I will tell you that at least one local family has already tagged their Christmas tree. The race is on! Because the tree is growing on a tree farm and no snow has fallen yet the outing was painless and even joyful (despite a brief and friendly argument about whether to tag a mean old blue spruce or a friendly Douglas fir), but there is still plenty of opportunity for this Christmas tree story to have an unhappy ending like so many others.
The staunchest supporters of the Methow Valley Nordic Team gathered at the Mazama Country Inn on Saturday night to make sure that the ski team is financially viable for another year. Guests bid on auction items, ate a delicious meal, and pledged their support for the young skiers of the Methow Valley. As people departed there was, as you might expect, quite a bit of talk about the groomed tracks at Washington Pass, and who had been up to ski already and who was headed up the next day. These folks get excited about making it possible for Methow Valley youth to experience the joy of Nordic skiing, but they get equally (if not more) excited about experiencing it themselves.
It seems like half the valley was in one of two places on Sunday: up at the pass playing in the snow, or at the Sun Mountain cabins celebrating the birthday of a family member. Emmet Bondi celebrated his 8th birthday with a cabin slumber party and a game of sardines in the dark, while Lily Holston played cards with family and friends in a nearby cabin for her 18th birthday. Lily just missed voting in her first election by a couple of days, but looks forward to casting her first vote in the year to come.
