Now that a fat layer of snow has blanketed our world, it’s safe to say winter is here. But for people who love getting their hands in the dirt, the seed catalogs are out, and plans for spring planting are germinating.

Reha Greenhouses in Wellman is one of those go-to places for gardeners during the growing season, its temperate greenhouses filled with a rainbow of annuals, perennials, and vegetables. If you’re a regular, it might sadden you to know that the retail store closed its doors this fall with no plans to reopen.

Or perhaps I should say that another way: the retail store retired.

The business, which turns 50 this year, seems too young to retire. 2023 was one of its best years. But owner Marianne Reha-Van Roekel said they wanted to “stop on a high.”

I ran into Marianne at Federation Bank in Wellman a couple weeks ago, where you can find her behind one of the teller windows. After going on a 500-mile pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago, in Spain last fall, she started an encore career working at the bank.

“I’m learning,” she said. “There’s a lot of things I just didn’t know happen [at a bank].”

“We still want to keep dabbling and growing,” she said about the greenhouse as we chatted. She and husband Marty intend to scale back the volume of plants they grow and sell them through other retail outlets.

Marianne highly recommends their friends at Pleasant Valley Greenhouse in South English, so consider making a stop a little further west this spring.

I just finished reading “On the Ledge,” a memoir by Amy Turner, in which the author, age 60, finally finds the courage to hunt down newspaper photographs and stories about an incident that happened to her father when she was four years old. A priest talked him out of jumping from a hotel ledge, and the event became national news – and defined her life and identity.

By confronting those images and reading those news stories, she gained a fuller understanding of what happened, both to her father and herself. The resulting breakthrough was greater than what she was able to achieve in years of therapy alone.

Lately I’ve been contacted by a few people looking for old newspaper stories about events that happened decades ago. It may interest you to know that you don’t have to come down to our office and search through volumes of newsprint to find old stories; our archives, as well as those of other area newspapers, are online. Visit seiowa.advantage-preservation.com and do a search to find what you’re looking for.