12 All Point Bulletin • April 2026
Stories of the Point: Kris Lomedico By Aly mcGEE
Kris Lomedico pictured here at the Point Roberts Library, where she has worked since the mid 1980s. Photo by Erin Kelly
Point residents and regular visitors alike probably know Kris Lomedico from the library. After all, she has been working at the Point Roberts Library since 1984. Talking to Lomedico about Point Roberts is a conversation hemmed in nostalgia and laughter. Lomedico has seen a lifetime of Point Roberts history firsthand, and the following is just a glimpse into her life story. Lomedico’s father, Agnar Magnusson, was born in Point Roberts to Icelandic parents, and her mother, Shirley Dennison, grew up in the Ladner and Tsawwassen area.
Her parents met while Shirley was delivering Vancouver Sun newspapers on her bike one day. Shirley had a flat tire and was pushing her bike down what is now Benson Road. Agnar saw her from his front porch and offered to fix it. Subsequently, Lomedico was born at the closest hospital to Point Roberts, which was an hour away in Vancouver, B.C., as were most of her siblings. The closest U.S. hospital was a two-hour trip. Just as many Point Roberts children do today, Lomedico went to elementary school in Point Roberts and then attended Blaine High School. “We rode our bikes everywhere … You didn't have too many friends, because there was just a small selection,” Lomedico said of childhood. “The ones you had, you had to be pretty nice to. If you fought with them, you had to go make up.” Lomedico remembered the secrecy of local blackberry patches fondly. Parents wanting to keep the kids busy would send them to pick wild blackberries and huckleberries. Early in the morning she and her siblings would dress in long pants and long sleeved shirts, be dropped off at the blackberry patch and were told they would be picked up later. She said every family knew of a place where the blackberries grew, but “they would never tell anyone else.” She said the wild blackberries “were just treasures.” Lomedico recalled when a local benefactor finally built a play-
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ground behind the school building. “Community-minded folks provided us with a little playground with a new slide and monkey bars and one of those merry-go-rounds the kids jump on and step off again,” she said. “It was huge.” She went on to attend University of Washington in Seattle and married Ivan Mojica, her first husband. After the birth of their first child, they moved to Costa Rica for two years. Then they lived in Panama for four years and Honduras for another two. When they lived in Panama Lomedico would take her family to beaches and to watch ships passing through the Panama Canal. She called living internationally “a real education,” adding it was “good for the children to be exposed to a totally different kind of life.” While her husband’s work enabled the family to live internationally for a long time, eventually the jobs were scarce and the jobs that were available were in countries where there was a lot of danger. Lomedico and their children moved back up to the Point in 1982, staying with family until they bought the house where she still lives today. In 1991, Lomedico married her second husband, Ricardo Lomedico, and together, they eventually owned The Letter Carrier, which was a parcel pickup service. Lomedico started working for the Point Roberts Library in 1984, after her mother told her, “Kristen, there’s a job down there at the library, you get down there and apply for it.” And she did. It was an entry-level, part-time job, but Lomedico stayed on and works there to this day. When asked what her favorite thing about Point Roberts is, Lomedico said, “I like the beaches. You know? I love to walk on the beach, look for agates and pretty stones. The air down there kind of revives you.” Lomedico spoke fondly of “the views, the sunsets in the mountains, the water, the lights at night.” When she was little, Lomedico said, “We would drive over to see my grandparents who lived in the Tsawwassen area. As you go through the border, you’re on that hill, and there’s the lights of Vancouver in the distance and that was such a thrill.” When asked what sets the Point apart, Lomedico said, “It’s so unto itself ... you can’t just decide that you’re going to drive down the road and get to Point Roberts. You have to go through borders. You have to be prepared and all that, especially these days.” It wasn’t always that way. “It
was much more fluid when I was growing up, because much of my family just lived in Tsawwassen and Ladner, so we just would go across easily,” Lomedico said. A few summers ago, Lomedico went with her son to see the yellow-bellied marmots living in Tsawwassen near Roberts Bank and the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal. She said they come right up to visitors and beg for food. Lomedico talked about how before the ferry slip went in, people would go to the beach on the Canadian side where there was a skid hill for timber. “You could walk up there and kind of come back down, sliding half the way, it was a great thing to do,” she said. Lomedico authors the monthly Library Quick Picks column for the All Point Bulletin. When asked if she has a favorite book, she said, “I love so many books. I really do. I like mysteries. I like fantasy, I like a lot of things. You never know what’s going to strike your fancy.” Lomedico mentioned that she has been particularly partial to checking out audiobooks on CD. Living on the Point, the drives to the mainland are long. “You really need something to keep you going,” she said. “So those have been a joy to listen to, and that’s how I do my reading, my fiction reading.” When asked to recommend one book, in true librarian fashion Lomedico said, “Everybody has different tastes.” That being said, Lomedico did recommend “The Dutch House” by Ann Patchett, “The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece” by Tom Hanks, and “The Cold Millions” by Jess Walter, which was a Whatcom READS selection a few years ago. Lomedico’s stories show a history of the Point’s changing landscape and a timeline of the fluctuations in convenience and access. Her story also illustrates how change is a constant. When Lomedico was young, her parents lamented that the barn on their property didn’t have animals anymore, as it had when her father was young. She said that her parents “both kind of felt sad that us kids wouldn’t grow up knowing what it was like to have to get up and milk a cow.” But, she said, “Us kids didn’t miss that at all.” If you would like to nominate someone you feel lifts up the Point Roberts community, please email aly@daffodilpress.net with their name, contact information and why you think they should be featured in Stories of the Point.
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