Reminiscence

Dear Hearts, I am getting ready to leave the home where I have lived since 1977.

I am leaving the island for the mainland and assisted living. At 78 my health has been going downhill. Bummer, huh? Oh, I’m feeling all right now. They have me on meds that are keeping me stroke and heart attack free, so far.

That’s the main reason I’m moving off – to have ready access to medical assistance.

Another reason I am moving off is that I wish to avoid riding in ambulances on Vashon Island. Riding in an ambulance on Vashon is a bone-rattling experience, and even strapped to the gurney I felt I was about to fall on the floor every time we went around a curve.

It would be silly to say that it is not the same island I first came to in 1972. Well, duh.

Of course we always knew we were living in paradise, those of us who were comfortable with using ferries and knowing it would take an hour and a half at least to go, well, anywhere.

In 1972, if you saw a freak (that's what we called hippies in those days) walking down the side of the road, you waved and smiled, maybe even flashed a peace sign, because we were a rarity, and it was always cheering to see a fellow member of the freak family.

Those people were the thin end of the wedge. The hippie arts and crafts culture arrived like something a king tide had washed up on these shores and there were kids who grew up here who became part of it. There were lots of potters, candlemakers, jewelers, midwives, musicians, back-to-the-(is)landers, and artists and writers and cartoonists and spinners and weavers. Oh, and at least one of the first ten Microsoft employees (number 9).

It cost a nickel to make a call from a pay phone here, and you only had to dial five numbers, like 3-0123, and that was a modern innovation – not long before that you only had to dial four numbers.

On your home phone, you might be on a party line. You had to listen when the phone rang to see if it was your ring, like two longs and one short, for example.

When you picked up your phone to call someone, there might already be someone on the line. So you hung up right away and waited for the line to be clear. That was party line etiquette. That’s what you were supposed to do. It was considered bad manners to listen in on someone else’s call. It might have happened. I would not know. I of course never did it.

If you got a wrong number call, you could direct the caller to the correct number because you knew the person they were calling. 

Now we carry our phones with us, and we do not dial anymore. We tap screens.  I have been told that today’s 20-somethings don’t know how to dial a phone, can’t read or write cursive, don’t know how to tell time on a clock, and don’t know how to sign their signature because they don’t write checks.

The island went from being a small town of commuters and farmers to including people of the alternate lifestyle persuasion. Women in long skirts and guys with long hair became common sights around the island.

In those days, a lot of young mothers, and I was one of them, gave birth at home rather than going to a hospital.

Michael Meade opened Minglement, where you could get organic foods and local pottery, and eco-friendly products, among other things.

Once he got a shipment of raw honey in a barrel. It had set up as a hard, ivory- colored mass, and it had pieces of bees in it. You had to dig chunks out of it, take it home, and heat it up to make it into honey as we think of honey, amber and flowing. Then you would have to pick out the bee bits.

The Blue Heron Art Center was started in an old former church on Bank Road. The organization soon moved down the highway to the Odd Fellows Hall, and the church building became The Children’s Center, a daycare. That’s long gone now.

Drama Dock was founded. Before the opening of the first play, they threw a party at the castle on Maury Island. That house is at the end of a narrow driveway, and you had to park on Dockton Road and walk in. Rick and I were invited to sing.

Ray Aspiri drove his relatives down the driveway and dropped them off and came back down the driveway to pick them up at the end of the party. Ray had a vanity license plate that read BASQUE, because he was proud of his Basque heritage. When he picked people up, his car was blocking the driveway and we were all having to squeeze and wriggle around it. I saw that license plate and said, “That’s what happens when you put all your Basques in one exit.”

I have written that story before, but honestly – how many times in one life do you get an opportunity like that? Sorry for repeating. I do amuse myself.

It was a more innocent time in some ways, I suppose. Or maybe I was more innocent. I am not saying it was better, only that it was different. There were no cell phones, no personal computers, no internet.

There was a lot of drinking, and some drugs, and occasionally someone would drive off the road and get killed, following which a little shrine was built at the site of the wreck. Some of those shrines are still around. I am not nostalgic about that. I hated seeing kids growing up and then getting erased before they reached adulthood.

I heard that there were 26 churches on the island then, and there was a cadre of Jesus freaks, and something called Unity. Hallelujah!

I was young and I was gigging around the Sound, and in Oregon and California, me and my guitar and my original songs. It was fun. I cleaned houses for money. Not so much fun, but one of the best-paying jobs on the island at the time.

I remember seeing Kat Eggleston, then a high school student, sitting in an audience and I could see the wheels turning in her mind: “I could do that.” And boy, did she, and she still does, better than I ever could. Hats off to Kat. You rock.

I wanted to get married and have children, and boy, did I. It didn’t leave much time or energy for pursuing the singer/songwriter career, but I only aspired to a little life, on a beautiful little island, and that’s what I have had.

Now it’s time to move on. I have lived longer than I expected to live, and while my health is wonky now, apparently I am not ready to drop dead yet. I mean, you never know, do you? But now I wake up in the morning and say, wow, I’m still here. Thank you, Jesus. Help me to be as much of a blessing as I can be to as many people as I can.

I’m hoping to make up for some of the times I have exasperated people. There are some people who have been waiting a long time for that.

 My messy little life

Anni

It was after Anni died that I had the epiphany that we love our friends for their faults as much as their virtues.

Anni was a beautiful young woman, tall with long blonde hair. She played women’s rugby, and baseball, and I know she did construction work, among other things. She was a member of the Women’s Choir in the early 80s, and a close friend of my singing partner Velvet.

One night she came to choir rehearsal on crutches. She had started a new job at UPS and her very first day her leg was injured, and she was rushed off to the ER. We all wanted to know what happened, and we sat around the long table in the kitchen of the Blue Heron, and she told us. She had us all collapsing with laughter as she told her story.

One day I ran into her in the women’s bathroom on the ferry to Fauntleroy, and she started talking about her oily skin. How it was annoying now, but she knew that as she got older it would keep her younger looking and wrinkle free.

Sigh. We shall never know if she was right about that.

She was a terrible driver. She gave me a ride to rehearsal once and scared the living carp out of me. She was reckless, and drove too fast.

One time when I was driving up to town on Cove Road, I saw her van come out of the side road without stopping at the stop sign and hurl into Cove Road traffic without a pause.

I remember how my stomach dropped when I saw that. Geez, Anni, you took a big chance there. There were cars coming. You know, the laws of physics won’t be suspended merely because of your strong will. Not that I ever said any of that to her.

One afternoon in September 1987, the trio, Women, Women and Song (Libbie Anthony, Velvet Neifert, and me), was rehearsing at the Blue Heron for a concert we were going to do the following weekend. Suddenly we heard multiple sirens. Something big was happening. We paused, curious, but realized we did not know where they were going and there was nothing we could do about it. We continued rehearsing.

Later we would hear about what caused the big ruckus.

Anni was driving her van home from a construction site. She had a load of lumber in the back of her van.

She came around the right-angle corner where 87^th Avenue turns into Cemetery Road, and the story I heard was that she was leaning over doing something on the floor of the van, not watching the road. Her van ran into the 118 bus that was coming from the opposite direction, head on, hitting the corner of the front of the bus exactly where the steering column of Anni’s van was.

On impact she was thrown forward into her steering wheel and the crumpling front of the van, and the lumber in the back of her van came flying forward and hit her in the back and head.

She was trapped inside the van.

It took a half hour or forty-five minutes for the responders to cut the van open and get Anni out of the wreck and into an ambulance that took her to Harborview in Seattle.

She lingered for 30 days. In the end, sepsis took over her body, and she died.

Her husband, from whom she was separated but not divorced, received medical bills that added up to $750,000. That was in 1987. The equivalent today would be almost $2,200,000. Somehow, he managed to pay it off, with a lot of help. At least I think he did.

Anni is buried in the Vashon Cemetery. Her husband, also a construction worker, built a concrete border around her grave. He put things he associated with her in the concrete: a baseball bat because she played baseball, some tools because she worked in construction, and a huge, long spike, which, he told me, represented the way she could really stick it to you.

He told me the story of the time when they were still living together that he brought home a bag of chips. She had forbidden such junk food in their house, and she took the bag out into the driveway, put it down by the van, and ran back and forth over the bag several times to make her point that she would not tolerate such things in her house.

Did I mention that Anni was a strongly opinionated person?

In the months and years that followed, I would sometimes visit her grave, and even tried to plant some flowers there, which did not take. Grave tending is apparently an art of its own.

Gradually, as my life went on, I forgot to visit her grave, and I seldom thought of her, until this morning when I was thinking about some of the people whom I have known in this life, and how most of them could be incredibly annoying at times.

I remembered my Anni epiphany: we do not love people only because they are nice or sweet to us. We love them for their faults, too. When someone annoys you, if you love them, that annoyance carves them deeper into your heart. It might seem crazy or irrational, but I believe it’s true.

Nowadays we have become aware of neurodivergence, of people having ADHD, or being autistic, or “on the spectrum,” but in the mid-80s that knowledge was only beginning to surface into public awareness.

Neurodivergent people often are blind to social cues, and for that and other reasons they can be annoying to other people.

So can neurotypical people.

Okay, let’s face it: human beings can be annoying, and if you get close to almost anyone, you will at some point feel annoyed by them. It is good to hold onto your humility and remember that you are annoying, too.

I know that one of the ways my ADHD is annoying to others is that I am always late. I cannot think of anyone who has found that endearing. Maybe after I’m dead.

If they had been able to get Anni out of the wreck sooner, she might have had a chance to survive. After she died, the Fire Department got a “jaws of life” device to quickly get people out of wrecked cars.

I will not say that the acquisition of the jaws of life meant that she did not die in vain, because she did. She was a lousy driver,
she made a fatal mistake, and she died, and it was not fair.

Darn it, Anni. You should be getting old with the rest of us. You and your wrinkle free skin.

My Beautiful Cousin Nancy

 My Beautiful Cousin Nancy 

"To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig."
My mother used to say this as we were coming home from shopping in the big city of Watsonville.

Watsonville was about 20,000 people in the 1950s, which was big enough for a little farming and food processing town, not to mention the brothels, which I probably shouldn't mention, but they were a big part of the town's economy back in the day, and I write for adults, so there, I mention them.
The brothels of Watsonville and Pajaro affected my family's life.

After the death of my grandmother, Lyllian, from Pick's disease (a dementia that affects young to middle aged people. You can look it up) in 1938, my grandfather consoled himself in the brothels of Watsonville, and across the river in Pajaro.
He brought some of the girls home, to the extreme annoyance of his adult daughters, and eventually married one named Sally. They had an agreement that Sally would stay with him until he died, at which point she would inherit the ranch.

But Sally – oh, Sally – at some point got weary of her promise, or perhaps got a better offer, and she ran off for about six months.

When she came back, my grandfather changed his will. She would no longer inherit the whole ranch, however she would get a lifetime income from the ranch, until she died. After her passing the ranch would go to my grandfather’s heirs.

The heirs were my grandfather's four children, Thelma, John, Lois, and Vivian (called Chick).

Two of them, my dad John and his sister Chick, died long before Sally did. Chick from multiple sclerosis (1964) and my dad from heart disease (1975).
Chick and her husband Art had two daughters, Nancy and Charlotte.

Nancy was about 9 months older than me, and we bonded early and deep. After I moved to Washington state, we didn’t see much of each other for a few decades except for occasional visits, but we talked on the phone and sent each other cards and letters.

Nancy and her sister Charlotte and I developed a running joke: "Is Sally dead yet?" Meaning, are we getting an inheritance yet? It made us laugh. We were not exactly holding our breath for that big pie in the sky day.

Nancy and I used to talk for hours on the phone, and one time when she called me, I had been having a rough time and when she asked, "How are you?" I said, "I am - just - *ucking - peachy." 

We both fell out laughing.

Later she was diagnosed with colon cancer and she had surgery and chemo. That went into remission, and then it came back, and “*ucking peachy” seemed like an apt expression for how things were going.

The cancer finally got Nancy in 2014. Isn’t that just *ucking peachy?

 She talked to me beforehand about knowing she was going to die, and knowing the surgery and chemo were stalling tactics, and about the nights she cried, alone in her bedroom, knowing her life was going to end, and how scared and sad she was.

She also lived her finite life to the fullest. She and her sister Charlotte went on road trips around the West. I got included in some of those trips. I went to Glacier Park with them, and decided that Glacier Park should be on everyone's bucket list. My gosh. Natural beauty like I had never seen before.

We also did a cemetery tour in Watsonville, where various relatives were buried. My parents, our grandfather and grandmother, a few great aunts and great uncles, and next generation aunts and uncles. My stillborn sister, who rests in an unmarked plot under grass.

In January, 2014, Nancy went blind in one eye, the result of her chemo treatments.

That’s one of the things about cancer treatment. The treatments can be more brutal than the disease.

At that point Nancy said, I'm suffering, and she decided to stop fighting the cancer.

In April she went into hospice, at her home in Benicia, California.
I went down to see her.

Now, Nancy was the most ridiculously upbeat person I have ever known. I cannot tell you why. Life sure did not give her many breaks.

Her favorite song, which she asked me to sing for her, was, "Smile." The haunting melody was written by Charles Chaplin, and the lyrics were added later by a couple of guys named John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons.I sang it for Nancy:

Smile, though your heart is aching
Smile, even though it’s breaking
When there are clouds in the sky
you’ll get by
If you smile through your fear and sorrow
Smile and maybe tomorrow
You’ll see the sun come shining through
for you

Light up your face with gladness
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near
That’s the time you must keep on trying
Smile what’s the use of crying
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile
If you’ll just
Smile
©Copyright 1954 by Bourne Co. Copyright Renewed All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured

I visited Nancy, I sang the song for her, I said farewell and came home to the Northwest.
Sometime in May her sister Charlotte called me and said that Nancy wanted to talk to me.
Her voice was so gravelly from her illness that I could not understand what she was saying, so I had to ask her to repeat herself a couple of times.

Finally, I got it.
She was saying, "Is Sally dead yet?"*

That was the last time I talked to her.

She died about nine in the evening on my birthday in May.

It was about five months after my husband Rick died. I spent some time being a little pissed off at God then. How was I to get by without those two, who had known me the longest, and known me the best, and loved me anyway? You know how I did it - how we all do it - one foot in front of the other, one day at a time. 

How I miss them both. 

*Sally died in 1990 or ‘91.  We did not hear until months afterward.

 

Annals of Aging: the Golden Years

 Photo: me and my friend Charly Franklin, probably at Lisabeulah, many long years ago. It got inserted by accident and has nothing to do with the essay, but I like it, looking at us with dark hair and big smiles. Ah, youth. Well, middle age, I think.

It is my theory that the golden years are golden because of the urine we leak.

Do not pretend that you do not know what I’m talking about.

As we age, different parts of the body throw in the towel at different times, and the progression is different and unpredictable for everybody.

My knees, for example, did not write me a suicide note when they gave up, but that was a process that happened over several years.

When I was younger, I broke a couple of vertebrae in my lower back, and vertebrae do not heal back the way they were. I saw an x-ray, and I swear they looked like a jar of gravel. I am grateful that I can walk at all.

Mobility became harder. I went from a cane to a walker, and now, to a wheelchair.

The wheelchair is because my sense of balance has left the building, and I hope to avoid falling by not trying to walk. It is working so far. Haven’t broken anything since starting to use the wheelchair.

I cannot express how heartbreaking it was to discover I could not get myself up off the floor when I fell. I am independent, and stubborn, so I’m told.

I tried. Pushed my legs so hard with nothing happening until I gave up. I had to call 911 for a floor lift. For a while there I was a frequent flyer with the Fire Department EMTs.  

For the most part the EMTs were gracious, which I do not consider a given because I am obese. Not an easy lift. But they have ways of dealing with these things, and they got it done. Thank you, EMTs. You rock.

But getting back to the gold, incontinence is a common condition. For a lot of women, it began when we gave birth, so we have lived with this condition for a long time. A sudden laugh, a sneeze, a cough, running, standing up! So many things led to leaks, some larger than others. I started wearing pads and carrying spare pads and sometimes even spare underwear and pants when I was going to the mainland. You plan your life around it.

Sorry about the TMI. I would not be so generous with my sharing if I did not know that I am not the only one dealing with this. An inconvenient fact of life for so many of us is what it is.

I have heard that some people have been able to heal incontinence through surgery, or exercises to strengthen the pelvic floor. Not me, at least not yet. I am keeping the adult diaper companies in business.

They all advertise that they don’t leak, but my experience is that they do.

“Wouldn’t you like to wake up dry?” their ads say.

Boy, I sure would.

Darn. Nobody told me that old age would be like this. Wet. Golden.

When you are young, you want to live a long time. You cannot know or understand how different 77 is from 27. Things happen, not the least of which is your body aging naturally, and the accidents which hurry along your decrepitude.

So I say to you, brothers and sisters and gender neutrals, we are all in this together, though dealing with it individually.

And to those of you who are still high and dry: well, aren’t you lucky. Enjoy that.

Letter to a friend whose husband recently died

Dec. xx, 2025

Dear *****,

I did see your daughter's notice of her dad's passing. I am so very sorry.

If you will pardon my saying so, fuck cancer. I hate it. It has taken so many people too soon.

My Rick was 68 when he passed, and I thought he was way too young, and it was way too soon. He was ill for five years.

For the first four and a half months after he was gone, I was numb, and sat in a chair on the kitchen porch staring at my little slice of heaven here. 

About May the numbness wore off and I started to crack like an egg. That was an interesting summer. 

Everyone’s experience is unique.

I will not tell you, “It gets better.” It might not.

I will not tell you he’s in a better place. The best place for him would be alive, and well, and with you.

I will not tell you that God has a plan. If there is such a plan, it is random and brutal.

I will not talk about the “stages of grief.” You may find yourself going through all the stages every day, many times.

It changes a bit as time goes on. I can tell you that.

You are now a member of one of those clubs that nobody wants to join, but you will find that people who have been through it will show you so much compassion, and understanding, and sympathy.

You will also notice that people who have not been through this loss really don’t get it. It’s okay. They can wait for their turn.

You will find, if you haven’t already, that he is part of you. Things he said and felt and did are all part of you, melded with you over the years, and he will show up every day in your mind and heart. He is always with you.

Okay, end of sermon.

I wish you all the best. I wish and pray for you to have peace, and grace, and the knowledge that you will get through this. You will. Your daughters, your friends, anyone decent who encounters you, will support you, even if they don’t say a word.

So there.

Blessings, love, hugs,

Mary

There is a graveyard in Manteca

 

There is a graveyard in Manteca

Where some of my ancestors sleep.

Pioneers.

 

When I was in school, learning about "manifest destiny"

And Indian wars and mountain men

And heard about the wagon trains

I wondered if that was how

Our family came out west.

So, I asked my father, 

"Did the Litchfields come west in a wagon train?"

I can see him sitting in his kitchen chair, laughing, holding a cigarette that he was smoking,

Still laughing, he said

"No, they waited until the railroad was built,

And then they came out west."

Oh. 

So the Litchfields waited until it was easy.

I was disappointed.

 

I have since learned that my father’s narrative was not wholly accurate

There were some Litchfields who came out west 

Before the railroad did

And they settled around Manteca, California, where they were farmers.

Later, more Litchfields did come west on the train

They were coming to join their relatives who were already living in the promised land of California

Farming in the fertile soil of the northern San Joaquin Valley

At that time, the railroad across the country had only recently been linked,

East to west, with the driving of the Golden Spike

A Litchfield family - mom, dad, and children

Boarded a train from their home in the Midwest to go to their family members, and a new life, in California.

People rode in one of three classes of passenger cars:

First class were the Pullman passenger cars

Third class were cheaper, for immigrants/emigrants

Sometimes, not usually, people rode in boxcars.

According to a family history, that’s where those Litchfields rode

But they were going across the country on a train in a few days

Instead of spending months in a wagon train, with all its hardships, illnesses, and deaths

So that must have been an improvement, don't you think?

Except

On the way

One of the children became ill

And died.

 

When the family finally arrived in Manteca

They were greeted by their family members

And they were able to lay their child to rest.

I suppose it was good to have a grave to visit,

Instead of leaving his remains under a mound of dirt somewhere on the prairie

So yeah, that was better than going by wagon train.

 

It is common knowledge that many children died all through history,

From various causes

Go to a nineteenth century graveyard, where you will find the graves of multiple children from the same family

 But then Dr. Alexander Fleming came back from vacation in 1928 and noticed a mold growing in a petri dish,

And the mold was killing bacteria

So he fooled around with it, named it penicillin, but abandoned the project in 1929.

Then

In the late 1930s

Two scientists at Oxford University, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, began working with penicillin again

And had production of the drug figured out by 1943

After which it saved the lives of thousands of soldiers who would have died without it

A miracle drug! 

Before penicillin it was not uncommon for children to die

Happened all the time,

Just like women died in childbirth all the time

Death was a common part of life

Maybe you didn’t expect all your children to make it to adulthood

Or yourself to make it through pregnancy and birth.

But I put it to you that the people left behind never became insensible to their losses

They grieved as profoundly as we do

When someone they loved died.

A child, a spouse, a sibling, a cousin, a best friend

Grief made them wail a howl that began in their bellies

And consumed their whole being.

Just like you and me.

 

More children grow to adulthood now,

Fewer women die in childbirth

At least in some places

But death, after all, is what we all have in common

And if you live long enough

You will see a lot of it

And lose a lot of people who were the landscape,

the environment,

even the furniture

Of your life.

 

So yes

S0me of the Litchfields came west on the train

They had it easy compared to the people who traveled

By horseback or wagon or on foot

Right?

I am old

I am old 

I pause now to consider

How shall I live these last few precious years of my life?

I nobly vow to be part of the Resistance

To the terrible fascism that has taken over my country

(Is there any fascism that is not terrible?)

Equally nobly I vow to love as many people as much as possible

And be grateful every day for who I got to be in this life,

And who I am now, despite my advancing years.

Lovely goals for a human being as flawed as I am,

Don’t you think?

 

Yesterday was my 46^th wedding anniversary

Never mind that I observe it alone

It’s a date that resonates in my mind and heart

A bit of Rick lives on in me

I want to apologize to him for the parts I didn’t get right

I want to respect his authentic self.

Better late than never.

 

Meanwhile, I watch Japanese TV

And play solitaire on my computer

And read Alison Bechdel cartoon collections

And have yogurt and granola for breakfast.

And coffee, of course.

I try to keep up with the laundry, and sometimes even

Sort through some of the overwhelming clutter.

I wash the dishes and sweep the floors and rake up cat hair

And doom scroll on Facebook

And keep waking myself up when I catch myself staring off into the distance,

at nothing

Which happens often.

 

I am old

I get confused easily

I can’t hear anything the first time

I sometimes take a nap in the late afternoon

And then I’m up until three or four in the morning

And miss a lot of daylight.

These things can deter a happy mood

But I keep trying

As long as I live, and write, and sing.

 

So let’s change the strings on the guitar.

They are old, too.