Page 11 - Sonoma County Gazette February 2017

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Achieve Financial Success
Redwood Credit Union (RCU) has launched a new FREE online Financial Wellness center to help people achieve nancial success. The new portal, located at redwoodcu.org/ nancial-wellness, features interactive videos, learning modules, articles, and podcasts designed to help people of all ages build a solid nancial plan.
“We’re committed to helping peoples navigate the path to nancial freedom,” said Brett Martinez, RCU’s president and CEO. “By providing them with
the right tools and education, we can empower and enable people to succeed nancially at every stage of life.”
By Elizabeth Carothers Herron
Every year on Valentine’s Day I celebrate the return of the steelhead,
Created in partnership with EverFi and in conjunction with the California Credit Union League, RCU’s online Financial Wellness center provides valuable tips on how to budget, read a credit score, build emergency savings, understand taxes, and more.
Oncorhynchus mykiss (their species name). Mykiss – what could be more perfect? Whether the run is late or early, on Valentine’s Day they are always in the river, thrusting upstream, in the laguna, in the creeks, heading home in an ecstatic urgency, driven back to their natal beds to spawn. If you watch the creeks in patient silence you will see them. If you listen at night, you will hear them
The portal features additional content from BALANCE, an education service committed to helping individuals and families take control of their nances and reach their goals. “We’ve always o ered free nancial education and resources on our website, but our new enhanced Financial Wellness center takes it to the
leaping, slapping cradles in the gravel bars.
They are here right now, as you read this – a thread of the culture of this place
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When you reach for your beloved, think of them. Half in air, he stutters across shallows, rushing to reach her. Veiled in dark water, she glides over the gravel. They are dancing when your hands entwine. He circles over her back. They weave the water in gure eights. She turns on her side, a rainbow through rain.
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that stitches you to the people who came before you, just as they stitch the land to the sea, returning nutrients with their very bodies. The carcasses of those that die feed critters all the way up the food chain – that osprey ying overhead a month from now, those river otters I saw last year up at Fitch Mountain.
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To hold them in your heart is to value an old companion. To hold them in your heart is to keep clean cold water in our creeks. To hold them in your heart is to protect our streams from toxins and sediment, to keep our hills forested, to restore our urban waterways.
Once by streamside with my lover, we saw a steelhead y up from the froth of a waterfall, fall back, leap again, fall back, leap again. Love and instinct. Without them, what would life be?
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