I first met Christopher Price 25 years ago when he became our family doctor. He was straight out of medical school, and I recall him making the case for a family practice. Here’s what I recall: When one physician treats all members of a family, the doctor can interact with the family more frequently. In the process, the physician sees people when they are healthy, not just sick.

This idea made sense to my husband and me. At one point, Dr. Price saw me, Jim, our children and my elderly mother. It worked out for everyone, and I had the opportunity to get to know our doctor.

There’s an old academic exercise among urban planners where they ask something like this: If a revolution comes to your town, will you instinctively know where to gather to find out what’s happening?

Identify a park or square where people would naturally flock, and it means your town has some appreciation for civic space and a sense of community fostered by planners and architects.

My family and I enjoyed living in Carmichael for 20 years. If that question were asked of residents there, what would they answer? Spoiler alert: They can’t say a strip mall or Starbucks.

The sights on lower X Street did it for me. Coming off the freeway, I saw wrecked cars and busted campers and people standing around, a pitiful procession pinned against the gutter like a forlorn carnival that took a wrong turn. Somebody stuck two orange traffic cones partway into the street, warning motorists to steer clear.

Lower X Street, home to warehouses and body shops, never delivered a welcoming hug to visitors who enter the city from river’s edge. Now it arrives with a punch in the face.

In 2010, Matt and Yvette Woolston opened a new restaurant in Carmichael. A follow-up to their much-lauded North Sacramento spot, The Supper Club, this new enterprise was more of a neighborhood joint, with a focus on wine, pizza and scratch cooking.

More than a decade later, Matteo’s Pizza & Bistro still attracts local diners looking for an upscale but unfussy evening of quality eats.

On a recent visit, my wife and I ran into good friends, the Au family of Carmichael. They were leaving as we were coming in. They gushed about the meal they just finished.

Dill havarti, mozzarella with homegrown basil and fresh warm ricotta. What do these cheeses have in common? Kim Mack, the Cheese Queen, makes them all.

Since beginning her cheese-making venture almost four years ago, Mack has experimented with about 40 different types of hard and soft cheeses.

Mack was born in Sacramento and works as a contracts analyst for the county Department of Human Assistance. She’s always been interested in culinary arts.

When Denise Rochelle McCoy dons a pink hard hat in March to participate in the annual Women Build event for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Sacramento, it will bring back memories. McCoy wore a hard hat to build her own Habitat house in 2015, when she took the leap into homeownership.

“I was renting a one-bedroom apartment in a challenging neighborhood where there was a lot of violence after losing my job,” McCoy says. “I thought, am I ever going to get out of this? It took three years of research, cleaning up my credit and saving money for a down payment, but I finally purchased my current property through Habitat for Humanity in 2015.”