DARRINGTON For the past five years, a group of Darrington-area residents has come together, twice each year, to put together care packages for local military personnel, but it wasnt until this holiday season that they were officially deemed the Hometown Support for those troops.
According to Hometown Support volunteer Patsy Cloer, the group has been coordinated by Cathran Lyons, of the Hometown Bakery Cafe in Darrington, and came to include calendars when its members asked service members from the region what they wanted to receive most, and we often received an emphatic response of Pictures! From there, the group decided to make its own calendars for the men and women in uniform, so that the gift of pictures would last an entire year.
While the group supplied its own photographs of the area, its members look forward to soliciting local images from their neighbors next year, since as Cloer asserted, if we had this many good pictures between ourselves, then there must be a treasure of great photos available from the community.
Since the coming years calendars would be the first ever produced by Hometown Support, Cloer admitted that the group soon discovered what an overwhelming job they had undertaken, which was why she expressed their gratitude toward Fran Hartnett, of Scrivener Copies, for helping them scale their learning curve.
We were very excited when we saw the calendars he had produced, Cloer said. They were very beautiful, and we knew that our servicemen and women were going to love receiving them.
Although Hometown Support already met Nov. 19 to place 38 calendars in the free care packages they were sending to the troops, the group has ordered additional calendars, to make them available to area residents, so that their donations might defray the costs of producing both the calendars and the care packages.
Lyons, whose son has served in such far-flung locales as Kosovo, thanked the community for their contributions of items as diverse as homemade jams and pillows, but also hoped that she and her group would be able to enlist their aid in continuing to furnish the hometown troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with some small measure of local support.
To order a calendar, or learn more about Hometown Support, you may contact Cathran Lyons at the Hometown Bakery Cafe in Darrington, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, at 360-436-9603.