5 years ago in Clay Today:

• With visitation extremely limited and everyday life altered, residents of Signature HealthCARE of Orange Park are trying to keep their heads up and the staff there is looking for creative ways to help them do it. Signature HealthCARE staff did just that, bringing a horse to the complex.
• The Clay County Clerk’s Orange Park Branch office at 1478 Park Ave. has been reopened for limited business. Services like passport applications and marriage licenses are available by appointment only.
• Clay County’s Habitat for Humanity partially reopened its doors this week as the First Coast gets back to work following closures that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. The administrative office went back to work on May 12.
• The Clay County Supervisor of Elections Office has resumed regular operations. Starting last Monday, the office was open to the public with a limited capacity permitted to wait in the lobby.

10 years ago:

• Clay County’s homeless pets got a double treat at Tuesday’s County Commission meeting as one animal-loving team vowed to donate $10,000 to the construction of a new shelter and to give the Fleming Island adoption center site a new lease on life – literally.
• JoAnn Matthews carefully attached a purple rose to a colored wreath honoring Clay County’s law enforcement officers who have died in the line of duty. Matthews travelled from Yukon, Okla., to take part in the Clay County Sheriff’s Office’s annual Police Officer Memorial Week ceremony held May 7 in honor of her great grandfather, Sheriff Josephus Anderson Peeler.
• A communal garden is now officially growing in a place where evil once lurked in an Orange Park neighborhood. Determined to bring some good from the terrible events that took her daughter’s life six years ago on Gano Avenue, Diena Thompson worked with a Northeast Florida group looking for places to grow fruit and herbs for anyone to enjoy.
• When the Pink Rib bon Symposium celebrates National Cancer Survivors Day on June 6, the group will honor Clay County cancer survivors – including a husband and wife who had cancer at the same time.