Edmonds Beacon - Your Hometown News Source

All of us will occasionally find ourselves standing in the kitchen, wondering why we went in there. In the age of COVID, I'm pretty sure this happens a lot. This has led me to become a little obsessive about backtracking everything, trying to figure out how I got to the weird place I ended up.

So, I was writing about how young this nation feels to me sometimes – that's where it started. I think about this sometimes, those 231 years of a functioning, if eccentric, republic, and how they form a speck in history, a piece of lint.

The microstate of San Marino, in contrast, has been around (a...