Maddie Hicks didn’t have a grand plan when she moved to Yakima 10 years ago.
She didn’t know she would become a business owner, a community activist and a key facilitator of the downtown Yakima art scene. She just knew she preferred Yakima to Killeen, Texas, which was the other available option for Hicks and her then-fiancé. They were coming back to the United States from Seoul, where they’d met — he was in the military, she was teaching English — and Yakima sounded all right.
“I remember reading the Wikipedia page, and it said Yakima grows whatever percentage of the world’s hops and whatever percentage of the country’s grapes,” she said. “And I said, ‘It’s going to be just fine.’”
The relationship never made it to the altar, but Hicks stuck around. Yakima felt comfortable to her. She met and married a local guy, Joshua…
