By Loretta Humble, Around the Town
I’m looking out my front window at two bronze kids. One is a pitcher, with one foot in the air, ready to throw, the other with his bat swung way back, ready to hit. Right now a sparrow is perched on that bat. He seems to have a better sense of reality than my dogs, who barked like crazy at them for several hours.
The beautifully life-like baseball players are a gift to our town from Mr. Jerome James, who tells me I should give all the credit to Mike Ferguson, who used to work as chaplain for Cedar Lake Hospice. I am certainly glad to praise Mike, who read my column about how much I would love to have bronze children playing in our budding pocket park downtown, and told Mr. James, who just happened to have some bronze children to spare. He had just sold his magnificent house on the lake where they had been playing, and was wondering what to do with them. Mr. James called me yesterday and told me to come get them, as well as a very nice picnic table. I offered to put a plaque in the park, in memory of someone of his choice. He said put Mike’s name on it.
Mr. James is officially giving them to the Malakoff Chamber of Commerce and/or the Garden Club, which ever works out best, but I got to bring them home with me to keep them safe until we can figure out exactly where to put them, and then get them bolted down so nobody walks off with them.
It is a wonderful thing when people give something the whole community can enjoy. I like to brag on them every chance I get.
But there is somebody I’ve been neglecting. It is my own companies. Cedar Lake Nursing Home and Cedar Lake Home Health and Hospice do a whole lot for our community, and I’ve been downplaying it because it felt like I would be self-serving if I talked a lot about it. Oh, I mention it, but not like I would do if somebody else did it.
Take for instance, those two old boarded up building downtown, across from the former Favorite Things. Cedar Lake Nursing Home sent our maintenance department down to give them new facades. We supplied the labor, and almost all of the material.
Then I bought the trashed-up lot between those buildings, and volunteers got it cleaned up and started planning to make a pocket park out of it. Although I bought it, I am supported by Cedar Lake Home Health and Hospice, who pays me a salary to spend my full time running around trying to help stir up good things in this community, particularly by producing www.facebook.com/aroundthetown. Basically that Facebook page is a small version of what Michael and Jeff are doing with Henderson County Now: I put out an online publication with one sponsor: Cedar Lake Home Health and Hospice.
The Humble family’s Cedar Lake family has been taking excellent care of folks around here since 1967. I am extremely proud of our companies, both for the care they give, and what they do for this community. And I am very grateful they let me do what I do. I promise not to turn into a walking commercial, but I really should brag on them just a little more.
By the way, just to make it clear: Nothing that Michael or I do can ever take the place of your good old print-on-paper-hold-in-your-hands hometown Malakoff News. We’ve got to remember how valuable it is to our community. So please keep subscribing, and give subscriptions for gifts, and tell your friends to subscribe. We need to appreciate what we have and make sure we keep it.
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Loretta Humble is the owner of Cedar Lake Nursing Home as well as their Home Health and Hospice. The former publisher of The Malakoff News, she has been covering the area for 20 years. Semi-retired for day-to-day running the companies, she is now a full-time spreader of (mostly) good news in her community through her Facebook page, www.facebook.com/aroundthetown. Since she is supported in this endeavor by her Cedar Lake companies, she jokes that she is the inspiration for the Michael’s and Jeff’s creation of Henderson County Now.