Thursday's Columns
July 24, 2025
Our
Story
by
Lawrence Abby Gauthier
ace reporter
The Westphalia Periodic News
I’m writing.
I’m at work.
Nothing’s happening.
Culley Jane comes downstairs with a load of laundry. I hear trucks outside, picking up the trash, so it must be Monday. A neighbor’s dog barks.
I hear the washing machine. It makes a sloshy mechanical sound.
I look around at the pictures on the wall of my office here at the world headquarters of Westphalia Publishing. The big corporate news this week is that Westphalia finally has a logo.
The logo was designed by Jess, who runs HiKu Graphics out of her house in Lyons, CO, located where the Poudre River comes out of the mountains to join the Platte to cross Nebraska to the Missouri, the Mississippi and back to the sea. She grew up in New York City. Jewish. She told me once that her parents had gone to Woodstock. Jess designs the books we publish here at Westphalia. She’s been in the business for years. She told me once that she can design whatever I can imagine. This past week she showed me a design for a company logo. I loved it! It was close to what I had imagined Westphalia could be.
The image of a turtle came to Culley Jane before it came to me. The image is a repeated theme in her latest novel, Virginia, West, published by Westphalia earlier this year and available on Amazon for $12.95.
The image came to her one morning while walking in the park behind our house. At the time, she was already working on Virginia, West. It’s about a recently retired librarian who moves from Minneapolis to Denver to be close to her daughter and grandchildren. They convince her to go on an internet dating site for people her age. The dates don’t all turn out too well. She’s picky. Nothing turns her off quicker than bad grammar.
Some of the characters in her book resemble people she meets and chats with in the park. Many of them are walking their dogs. Virginia has a dog too. It’s common to see people walking their dog in the park behind our house. There’s even a large open space where dogs can chase after Frisbees.
One day, however, Culley Jane came home from her walk and said she had met a lady who took her two very large pet turtles for walks in the park. I didn’t believe her at first until one day I met the turtle lady, myself. The turtles were unleashed and wandering around in the grass, one, plodding, determined step at a time. You almost had to blink twice to notice they were moving. But they were going somewhere. You could only assume that they knew where.
Culley Jane ended her book with this final paragraph:
“It was time, Virginia decided, to put together a book. Maybe ‘The Four Seasons,’ with all those pictures [she had taken] of the Mississippi. Or she could create a ‘Good Neighbors’ series to go with ‘Good Fences.’ Or something political — feminists through the ages, anti-war something or other, climate change. The main thing was to get started. Pick a goal and go for it. Pick up your feet, one after the other. Head down. Plow forward. After all, she was, let’s face it, a turtle.”
When I first started Westphalia going on like four years ago, I thought about getting a logo designed around the image of an old German castle on the Rhine. It’s where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648, ending Europe’s 30 Years War.
But the castle idea never made it out of my mind and into a logo design. I don’t know why. Maybe just because the castle idea is such an old idea. After decades of savage religious wars, the princely delegates to the 1648 Westphalia Conference finally had to admit that the only way to end the wars was to act in the best interest of their neighbors. It’s a great idea. How could anybody argue the point? The problem is not not knowing where we want to go, but how to get there
That’s why I was so excited when I saw the logo Jess designed for Westphalia.
You have to blink twice to notice that it’s even moving, like nothing’s happening, but then, suddenly, another story appears, an exclusive, and the job is done.
