Washington

Grandma lived on Johnson Point, a little peninsula of land north of Olympia. All the waterfront houses sat on a bank high above a rocky beach, with about 5 acres or so of woods behind them. It was a beautiful community of cute older hand-built houses, gardens, apple orchards, forest and beach. And when I say hand-built I do mean that. Grandpa (who I never met; he died in 1948) built the house. Mom has photos of the construction! In fact, they built the house around the wardrobe in the upstairs attic room! It was too big to fit through the door. Lou and Verene, two outrageously sharp and funny older ladies, lived two houses away from Grandma, with their Sheltie dog, Mickie. I absolutely adored Lou and Verene, and for a while in the mid-1980s Lou and I wrote letters back and forth when I was in Texas during the school year (this was the Dark Ages, kids; no such thing as e-mail yet). I found a stack of these letters in a box in my attic a few nights ago. I didn’t even realize I had them. I am sure there were more; maybe they’re at my mom’s house in a box somewhere. I’m going to post bits and pieces from several of them. For reference, Fran lived between Grandma and Lou & Verene, and was Grandma’s best friend. Echo was Fran’s huge slobbery basset hound. Alicia was the woman who bought Grandma’s house after Grandma died in 1984. She was known as “Alicia the Awful” to the neighborhood, and completely changed the atmosphere of this wonderful little community of neighbors and friends by being nasty, cutting down trees and putting up fences and such. A lot of what Lou wrote me had to do with “the latest” on Alicia’s […]