Melissa Grant Writes

I think one of my first columns for Living Snoqualmie was about proper poop etiquette.

Yes, I was fully immersed in the dog training world at this point. It was fairly preachy and high-and-mighty, and I had my first taste of interweb trolls, but I was having a blast.

Looking back, the articles weren’t all that great, structure-wise, but something about them seemed to connect with the Snoqualmie Valley audience.

The Valley is 30-ish miles east of the Seattle area, in the Cascade Mountain Foothills, with a population of about 65,000. It is 80% permanently conserved forest, and when I was growing up in the nearby suburb of Bellevue, it may as well have been Mars.

We would come out to the Valley, pretend to be lumberjacks at one of the numerous Christmas tree farms, and cut our tree down. The locals hated us.

I now speak for those locals.

Even before I started writing for the blog, I lived in the valley because, dang it, the man I fell in love with lived way out here. I had no choice, really.

After a couple of years, the economy got to the pet store owner too; she opened a mobile grooming business and closed the storefront, leaving me without a job. I was sad about the prospect of no longer writing the column, so the blog owner and I set up a new deal: I would continue to write for discounted advertising for my training business.

Over time, my dog column morphed into wildlife articles (there is a lot out here in the woods) and then general fun things about the area I now inhabited. Danna, the owner, took care of local politics and school news, and I searched for weird/interesting things to write about. This is ‘Twin Peaks’ territory, and weird is not in short supply.

This went on for 7 years, and then the pandemic struck.

My dog training and walking business tanked, but the blog exploded with viewers. People were at home, reading. Mark had always worked from home, so we were fine financially, but Danna’s husband’s business was also hit hard. In September of 2020, she was offered a job with a Valley city as their Public Information Officer, and since she had four children who needed things (pesky kids), she accepted. She asked me if I wanted to buy the blog. I said absolutely not.

Then I bought it.