Keeping in Touch

So, how do we do it, when there are so few of us down here over the winter? There are lots of ways. There are events like the Christmas Craft Sale and Community Dinner. Usually those are both in late November or early December, but this year they've been separated into the Craft Sale in mid-November and the Community Dinner in January. It's a lot of work to do these two events (all volunteer efforts) and the decision was made to separate them so it wasn't so much work all at once. The Craft Fair is this Saturday and I donated a quilt to its raffle.

Then there is church every Sunday at the Lutheran Church where people check in on one another. There's the Wacky Walkers, who walk most mornings, even in the winter. The library (open on 3 days of the week) and the grocery store (open every day) are places where we see one another and find out what's up. The grocery store has a coffee bar, as well as a big bulletin board that is particularly worth attending to. Here, you can buy (or sell) a wood stove; rent (or sell) a cabin, a house, a boat, or a car; solicit baby sitting work; or advertise a concert. And most of the local groups, including the quilters, meet monthly throughout the winter. The quilters have a festive pot-luck dinner at Christmas. We had an intense discussion at last week's meeting about whether the husbands should be invited to the dinner this year. The final conclusion was they should come because they help to eat up the too-much food that we always bring and because some of them like to see the work we're doing and because some of them like to see the quilters themselves and don't very often do so. This is the kind of critical issue we are facing, now that the election is over.

The Cafe Cappana is open all winter and there is always someone there drinking coffee, eating lunch or breakfast, or using the computers. The Cappana is the kind of place that every small town has or needs. Lake Wobegon would admire it: good food, familiar staff, local, in every good sense of the word. There is nothing about the Cafe that feels processed or chain-store-like. And you can read the newspapers there, too.

So there are all kinds of ways of staying in touch. In addition, there is the electronic connection. For some years, one of the good citizens of the Point has maintained an email list called 'Point Interface.' People send her notices, ranging from meeting announcements to lost cats and dogs to misplaced electric drills to free furniture and well beyond these. When Ed finished his photos of the Point Roberts coastline, an announcement of their existence went out on Point Interface.

Anybody on the Point can request to be put on the list, and the list, according to its owner, is expanding considerably. For those of us who have kind of given up on the telephone (count me as one of those...remembering that we don't have much cell phone coverage here on the Point), this electronic line is extraordinarily useful. The amount of work involved in screening the items that people ask to have sent out to the list (the owner exercises sole and total discretion about appropriateness) and in keeping the list up to date is considerable, and I am very grateful to the list owner for doing all this. I imagine that someday, everyone on the Point will be on that list and it will become to the monthly newspaper something like what blogs have become to journalism: less hierarchical, less categorized, more spontaneous, in real time. To get on the list? Email your request to point-interface which is to be followed by atpointroberts and then dot net Of course, you do that in the standard email form: i.e., in regular type (not italic) using no spaces and with @ and .

So, through these gray days, we do keep in touch in many ways. We know we aren't the only ones left on the Point, even though it sometimes feels that we might be.