In last month’s column, I said that whoever first spotted the wonky candy cane would win. I then proceeded to spot it in front of the Hardware Store, thus winning the game I invented.
And speaking of winning games of my own invention, I created a Bingo for 2026. The year is coming to an end, which means it’s time to look ahead to the next year and make predictions. The world has become so unpredictable, but I find that Vashon has a comforting consistency.
I then asked all of you what your predictions would be and harvested your answers.
One person says, “Thriftway becomes affordable.” Okay, you clearly don’t understand the point of this exercise. You have to pick things that could theoretically happen.
Another says, “Cathlamet finishes what it started by destroying the Fauntleroy dock. Flip side new terminal construction starts early.” I love the positive spin on this devastating tragedy. Way to keep an optimistic outlook in the new year.
One commenter predicts, “Someone going 10 under the speed limit…..” It’d be cheating for me to put that on my bingo card because I always drive 10 under the speed limit. This is a game of integrity, and I refuse to be corrupted.
One person says, “Swap out ‘another weed shop opens’ with ‘another art gallery opens’ and you’ll get a ‘BINGO’ for sure!”
To which someone adds, “or pizza parlor.”
I would actually love more art galleries and pizza parlors. It’s embarrassing how often I show my face at the same pizza parlor, and if I have greater rotation, the workers won’t know how often I eat take out pizza.
One person predicts, “Missing cat followed by missing cat owner being shamed for allowing a cat outside.”
By ‘missing cat owner’ do they mean owner of a missing cat, or do they mean the owner of the cat also disappears and, rather than people filing a missing person report, they just shame the person for not properly providing for their cat before vanishing from this plane of existence?
An islander created the below Bingo card, which has way better formatting than my card, which I made as a chart in Microsoft Word.
I’m hopeful that we get a non-alcoholic pub, a dog park, and a food truck court. But if you manifest a measles outbreak, so help me god, I will manifest that you never find parking at IGA again.
It looks like some people are jumping the gun and not waiting for the new year to realize my predictions. We have the following post, which is the third square in column O:
Every time someone finds a bag of poop, we have the same conversation. Why even bother bagging it? Because dog poop has strange germs that will harm our ecosystem. Yeah but so does plastic. Maybe just don’t have a dog. Train your dog not to poop. Only feed your dog organic roses so that their poop smells good. We have a novel comment on this post that I have yet to see on any other dog-poop-bag related post: “The only real solution is to ding-dong-ditch but how to find them and not everyone has a doorbell. Good chance to dress up for the door camera too.”
We may keep rehashing the same old debates, but something new, shocking, and unprecedented has happened on island. We got blinky lights around a couple stop signs.
We have multiple posts about it. The first is this:
Everyone in the comments has the same general feeling about it, and that feeling can be summed up as “why?”
One person says, “Don’t think they’ll do much good. The people who blow through stop signs will still do it. It would be better to install a camera to get their license plate and then mail them a hefty fine.”
Another adds, “And they aren’t even at problematic intersections! Like portage stop signs need a blinky outline if anything does”
One commenter says, “I’m already stopping as hard as I can, FFS.”
To which someone replies, “stop HARDER!”
I’m gonna roll backwards a bit each time I’m at one of these intersections to show proper deference to the Blinking Lights.
Someone asks, “Does this imply the 4 way lights will be removed at some point?”
Nope. All it implies is that our intersections will slowly morph into discotheques. They will be so disorienting and unnerving that people will struggle to pay attention to the road as they drive through them.
One person says, “I was so distracted by them I almost forgot to stop ” This also happened to me, but I didn’t want to be the first to admit it.
And finally someone suggests, “give everyone driving a white Porsche SUV a ticket.” I have no idea how this relates to the issue of flashing lights, but it’s always good to keep your particular bugbears in the front of everyone’s mind.
One islander was so inspired by the new lights that they wrote the following poem:
I would like to take a moment to appreciate that someone wrote a poem, and it’s beautiful, and it’s about stop signs. I did not have on my bingo card that people would turn mundane King County Road maintenance projects into poetry. The world contains beauty and whimsy beyond my predictive capabilities.
As a final note on this topic, one person asks a pressing question about these stop signs, “I’m all for common sense safety upgrades, but do we really need a blinking stop sign at an intersection with an already blinking light?”
And speaking of signage, we have the following post:
Looking upon this majestic and mythical beast, one person’s first thought is: “That’s something out of my gardening nightmares!”
Apparently, this beast is an even bigger curse to motorists. One person says, “Pretty sure I hit that thing on Wax Orchards, last summer, insurance paid for the body work to my Subaru. It flew off so fast into the forest I only got a glimpse.”
How is it that we have a poet who adds joy to a blinking stop sign, and then we have these grin pragmatists who see an otherworldly being, and they sigh and say, “gonna be a pain keeping that thing out of the apple trees.”
Though we’ve added to some signs to make them more beautiful, we’ve detracted from an iconic Vashon sign- that one duck by Portage.
One person says, “That duck made me happy every time I saw it. Happy for free is a rare thing, AND it was a Vashon ID tag. ”
That phrase “happy for free is a rare thing” broke me. I honestly sat there and stared at my wall and thought about how we came to be in a world where that sentence could exist and ring true.
Some people think it’s so artless it could only be the work of King County. They say, “Taggers typically wouldn’t buff something with lame white paint and not tag over it. I’m guessing an administration is the culprit.”
Another adds, “King county will cover cute harmless tags like the duck even if they cover it with bad scribbles like this. It’s lame and just makes the island look less joyful and more ugly and boring”
They should have put solar powered flashing lights around it instead.
We then get my favorite variety of facebook comment- a psychological profile of the presumed perpetrator: “Whoever did that did so with the express purpose of upsetting people. And if they think for a moment, otherwise-like some perverse community caretaker-they are LYING to themselves. Damn.”
Since the year is coming to an end, we should wrap up with the year’s greatest genre of post- unleashed dogs.
We are torn on this hot-button issue. One side is basically just like, shrug, they’re dogs, they’ll go home when they’re hungry. One illustrative comment of this idea is: “Dogs wandering a familiar route isn’t a new crisis. It’s part of how this island has operated for generations. Neighbors know the animals. They know where they go. They know who they belong to. It’s a rural community, not a gated HOA.”
To which a person responds: “oh cool. Since I don’t know every dog and cat in every neighborhood, please provide me with a list and photos of the ones that are only on a walkabout so I won’t have to be concerned about them.”
Challenge accepted. Everyone please post pictures of your pets.
Also, if I’m going to get Bingo points for coyote/golden hybrids, I need those dogs loose.
Many of us grew up in a time when dogs and kids roamed free. One person describes their idyllic childhood on island as such:
“I grew up in one of the smaller beach communities on the island in the 70s-80s. We were free range kids and so were our dogs and cats. I would leave the house in the morning and walk about a mile up the beach at low tide. I started with our one dog and had about 7-10 dogs by the time I got a mile out. Each dog running from its home to come play with us and walk the beach. On my way back the dogs would all return to their homes and I would have my one dog at the end of my walk.”
When I was a kid in suburban Connecticut, everyone had dogs, and they’d wander free. I still remember all the neighborhood goldens. I often had no idea who they belonged to. They’d show up and play with us kids and with the other dogs, then vanish at dinner time.
There was a dog catcher who would drive around and occasionally try to round them up. My dog Kelly got caught once and my parents had to pick him up at the pound. After that, wherever he heard the dog catcher coming, he would run home and sit just inside our property line and wag his tail, taunting the dog catcher. My neighbor Nancy referred to him as the dog catcher’s white whale.
One time some neighbors down the street sued my family because my dog would always poop in their lawn. My dad to this day maintains that they were just grumpy, ornery people, and Kelly was choosing their lawn as a way of showing his distaste for their character.
Anyway, instead of suing because of the pooping, they claimed he was a vicious dog and should be put down. So my dad brought our golden to court, and he proceeded to lick everyone and wag and be the absolute best dog who ever existed, and dad won the case.
So yes, our dogs were free when we were children and yes, some people were assholes about it back then.
And speaking of loose dogs, these are my two favorite dogs on island because they make my dogs seem less troublesome by comparison.
I would like to note that this is not my husky, although he looks like my husky and is likely related to my husky.
Also, I love how the brown husky has a chain on his neck. He was tied up and he got away anyway.
There is no containing huskies. They were born to roam the steppe, and they will find a way to do that. They’re smart, and they’ll eventually make their way home.
The other day my husky got away, and we searched everywhere for him. Then two hours later, he popped up beside the highway and just walked himself home. We then hung an air tag from his collar, which he promptly tore off. So we then duct taped an air tag to his collar. He scratched at it so much that it no longer works. He is fighting the surveillance state.
And speaking of lost souls, we’ll end with this boat, which represents how we’re all doing here at the tail end of 2025 – on our last dime and just barely above water.
Author: Anna Shomsky
I'm a former teacher and a data engineer living on Vashon Island. My writing has appeared in Five on the Fifth, Women on Writing and on the Post-Culture Podcast. I wrote and produced the radio show Whispers of Vashon for 101.9 KVSH. I’ve had short stories published in the anthologies Island Stories and Chicken Scratchings, as well as through the Open Space Literary Project.
