Memories Like a River

 

Memories Like a River

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One of my writer friends likens our lives to a river which carries us along from beginning to ending. I’m not the whole river so my memories are only a part of what is real. Each of us will remember a little differently, so there end up being many truths flowing along in the currents of our river, many stories, many versions and many revisions, all of them with pieces of truth.

The day before Christmas I received an email headed “Indiana Laconia Elizabeth Harrison County”. The message was from a woman whom I did not know but her name was familiar. I grew my earliest years in Indiana.

When I was days from twelve years, my Dad uprooted us to share his long-time dream to farm in Montana. Those first two years of Dad’s dream were my nightmare. I was so homesick.

When I was fourteen, my Dad sent us back to Indiana by train, to spend the summer with cousins and with my best friends.

Intrigued, I opened the message from Indiana to find a photo of a hand-written manuscript covered in brown grocery bag paper entitled, “The Best Friends Visit Montana”, with a list of characters, Sondra Jean, Phyllis, Janet and Jo Ann. Written by Jo Ann.

The woman who sent the email, Kathy, went on to say she found this manuscript in a box of stuff from Jo Ann’s Mom’s estate sale. Following this initial email, Kathy and I had a series of lively conversations, well peppered with questions from both of us. For me, what also followed was a whole flowing river of memories.

I lived further down the hill from a family with Kathy’s last name who lived in a small but lovely stone house. I had a crush on Richard (an older man by two years) when I was nine and ten. Was he her brother?

Back in those days, in that culture, my crush was of the type that I didn’t dare make eye contact with Richard. When I visited Indiana two years later, I saw the gangly, pimpled Richard standing on a street corner with his friends in front of the grocery in Elizabeth. Ewww. I still remember losing any vestiges of my long-ago crush. Later Kathy told me that Richard went on to be Homecoming King. Sigh.

Kathy was not Richard’s sister. His sister was Cathy. But they were cousins. She asked if I would like the manuscript. Of course, I want it, but I am willing to simply have copies via an email document.

My friend Jo Ann had passed on years ago from cancer. She had lived in Seattle for a while, perhaps I was across the water on the Peninsula at the same time, a thought that fills me with regrets that I might have been able, somehow, before the days of social media, to be with my old friend. Phyllis lives in Tennessee. She had located me a year ago and we keep in touch. I learned that Janet lives in South Carolina. Now I’ll get to talk with Janet.

We girls spent a lot of time with each other that summer of my vacation in Indiana, overnights in their bedrooms or in tents on a lawn. I remember one night, all of us sitting together, each with a different book, reading until a Mom hollered for “lights out”. That memory is smudgy so it might have been with a cousin, but does that detail matter in the greater River?

It was hard to go back home to Montana at the end of that summer.  Notice I say I went back home? I returned knowing I had forever friends. I returned with a different perspective. No longer homesick, no longer crying myself to sleep at night, I had my Montana home, an Indiana home, friends in both places.

I never lost that perspective, even when I lost contact with my friends in both States when we all left school and went divergent ways in our lives. I find it fascinating that in these, my sunset years, my old friends are so close to me in memory, bringing me joy.

I am grateful that Kathy reached out to find me, possibly forging another friendship in the process. Already I feel like she is a cousin of sorts, wading along in the same river. Know what I mean?

Sondra Ashton

HWC or whatever it’s called

First week in January

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The Winter of, The Summer of, My Disillusionments

 

The Winter of, The Summer of, My Disillusionments

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My friend Jim from Glasgow sent me a short video clip of the Little Rockies, Three Buttes, Snake Butte and the Bear Paws. Immediately, I yearned, homesick. I shared the video with friends. “This is my beautiful country.” Their response, not unexpected, “Ah, yes. Uh huh. Beautiful,” as they looked for an exit. Which brought on this following chain of thought.

To some this will sound as though I am describing two foreign countries, and I am. Both countries have disappeared.

My earliest years were spent in Indiana, not far from the Ohio River, a mile wide, where often we sat on a bank and watched tugs push three, four and five barges laden with coal or ore or other goods.

Uncle Jim came to visit. He and Dad talked late into the night. Not long after my Uncle left, Dad came upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed one night. “How would you like to go to Montana?”

“Where Uncle Jim lives? Oh, yes!” I thought Dad meant a visit, a vacation. By the time I figured out we were moving, I was horrified. Not that I had any voice in the matter. I was ten.

During the Great Depression, Uncle Jim had gone to work on a family friend’s wheat ranch south of Chinook. He never looked back. Dad had worked for the same man, before the War. Montana had burrowed under his skin, into his heart.

By the time we moved, Jim owned a Valley farm and a partnership in an implement dealership in Harlem. Dad was going to buy the farm.

We had our farm sale on a sunshine April Fools’ Day, green grass, daffodils waving their silly heads. The following day, our car already packed, we left for Montana, in the rain, an omen if ever there was one.

I left an entire family of aunts and uncles with cousins my own age. (Uncle Jim’s children were older.) I left an excellent school which encouraged students to find ways to illustrate lessons, left all my friends, and everything I knew. I left my rock collection, the geodes, all my toys, yes, toys. When I was ten, we were still children. I was allowed to take one ‘toy’. I chose my books.

On a cold afternoon, April 5, we drove into Harlem on the old highway, along a deeply rutted dirt street, icy and banked with drifts of dirty snow. I’d never seen a more desolate, ugly town, although we had been driving through the same towns all day. Thaw was a couple weeks away.

On my birthday I climbed on the school bus for my first day at Harlem Elementary, terrified. At lunch, a girl grabbed my hand, "Come with us. Sally and Sylvia (classmates) are going to fight in the park.” Now I was terrified and horrified.

Fight, they did, actual fisticuffs with blood. Girls!  In my country, boys wrestled in play but I’d never seen a real fight.

By the end of the first week in my new school, my classmates hated me. Nobody told me you weren’t supposed to have ideas.

I was yet to discover gumbo mud which stole rubber boots from my feet, mosquitoes so thick they covered my skin. Drought. Wind. Temperatures over 100 degrees and minus 40. A different country, harsh, a different culture, hard.

I cried myself to sleep every night that first year, remembering a softer, gentle life.

When I was thirteen, my Dad put us on the Empire Builder and sent us home to Indiana for the summer, a truly wonderful summer, with cousins and school friends.

Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.

There were all the remembered friends, flowers and fruit. Along with red clay dirt. And chiggers. (At least mosquitoes are visible and don’t burrow.) Copperheads in the weeds and slithering through the blackberries. Humidity which made 75 seem 105. I had to reconnect with friends. Or not. Nothing was recognizable. People I had idolized grew pimples. Or warts. (Metaphorical.) Depending on age. On our old farm, house, barn and my swing tree had been razed to the ground to make way for a sprawling brick “ranch-style” house.

At summer’s end, we climbed aboard the Monon, transferred to the Empire Builder in Chicago, and returned home. Home. Home to Harlem, where the streets were still dirt, but home.

Nothing had changed but me. I could see with different eyes, could measure on a scale more balanced. I never lost my love for Indiana, but I knew my home. 

I’ve learned to make my home in many different places. But Home will always be that harsh, hard country I love.  

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

November—yikes--middle

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Did you wake this morning still breathing?

 

Did you wake this morning still breathing?  

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Years ago when I was in the hospital in India getting a new knee, I walked the corridors as part of my therapy. At the end of the hallway I stood at the window and watched the construction activity across an empty lot. A new building was going up the old fashioned way, with men’s muscles, not machinery.

The empty lot was not really empty. The men’s families were camped in the lot. I’m making an assumption here. Perhaps they were homeless people, but as I watched, they seemed to be the families of the construction workers.

Pieces of cardboard, plastic, canvas, any flat surface, were cobbled together for shelters. In one corner a standpipe with a turn faucet provided the water supply. The women squatted over open fires, cooking. They washed their clothing in buckets. Children played around their mothers’ feet.

Every afternoon at 3:00 the skies above Bangalore opened. Monsoons are not comparable to the rainy season here in Jalisco. We have rain. They had deluge. The streets overran with water and garbage and unidentifiable debris.

When I was in China, I had the marvelous experience of riding a train inland. This was not an Amtrak train. In the center of the car was an iron stove, coal or wood, on which a hostess or porter heated huge iron kettles of water to make tea, available for a few pennies.

We passed huge factories flanked by housing for the factory workers. The train rain through tea plantations, fields of crops I could identify and others I could not, through cities and past city dumps crawling with children who lived at the dumps, pawing through the trash, picking out any item which could be sold or recycled.

I was reminded of living in Great Falls in the mid-sixties when one day I went with my husband to the dump out by Hill 57. We could have been in China. Today we do a much better job of hiding, of keeping invisible, our homeless and poor.

One of the big news items of the day is the universal scream, “What are we going to do about the upcoming Holidays with the empty shelves, the supply chain buckled?” What indeed?

One of my most memorable Christmases was also one of my poorest. In terms of grace and gratitude, one of my best. Newly divorced, I had moved from Chicago back to Montana and had little other than kids and a cat.

I’d recently started a new job for which I had no wardrobe. A woman showed up at my door with an armload of appropriate clothing. A neighbor family brought us a turkey.

On Christmas Eve we went to Church, returned home to find a tree on the front steps and another tree with a tree-stand on the back porch.  A knock on the door revealed another neighbor with an armload of well-loved decorations.

A friend from California had sent a box of gifts, a full set of clothing for each child, including shoes. When she was a child, her mother had been in a similar situation and somebody had done the same for her family. She asked that someday I do similar. I never forgot.

My own gifts for my children were sparse, much needed socks and coats plus one “toy”. Santa gave Ben, at two years old, a tool chest full of plastic tools. Dee, fourteen, got the boom box she wanted.

While I was fixing the meal, Ben crawled under the vintage table, formica top and steel legs. With his plastic screw driver he removed every screw from the legs. I noticed Ben was too quiet so asked his sister to check on him.

Dee Dee found Ben pulling the last screw from the fourth leg, crawled under the table with him and helped him replace the screws. Had the table top fallen, Ben would be no more. That set the pattern for his growing years. He needed to know how everything worked. Dee Dee is still saving lives.

In town there lives a family who touched my heart. In the first wave of the Covid 19, the whole family was ill and the father died. That left mom with two small children and elderly parents. This family is “needs food” poor. I know neighbors will show up with clothing and toys.

My Christmas gift will be the “turkey”, however that translates as the day arrives. This woman doesn’t know me. The family will never meet me. Now and then, when Leo goes shopping, I put extra pesos in his hand for “my family”. That is my gift to me.

I’ve been poor. I’ve seen poorer. Today I am rich. I have a refrigerator and electricity. I have a washing machine and running water. I have food in the pantry, enough to live a week without buying more.

When I wake up still breathing, I know how rich I am.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

October 28, 2021

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“Make love to me . . . “

 

“Make love to me . . . “

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“Ba ba ba ba boom. Take me in your lovin’ arms and never let me go. Whisper to me softly while the moon is low.”

I woke in the night with the inimitable voice of Jo Stafford as she swayed in her chiffon dress, singing at the mike, complete with the “Ba ba ba ba booms”, the band members behind her, all in handsome suits, well, handsome for that nugget in time.

“Hold me close and tell me what I wanna know; Say it to me gently, let the sweet talk flow.”

Remember when all the band members wore suits? I remember, perhaps a memory loop from “The Ed Sullivan Show”? I could hear individual trumpets, the drummer whishing brushes against the cymbals, could hear the entire music in my mind. Don’t forget the “Ba ba ba ba booms.”

“Come a little closer, make love to me.”

And I lay in there in bed, in the dark night, feeling totally and completely loved, listening to the rain patter on the roof, on the palm tree outside my window, smelling the wet mist.

This morning my daily Rumi poem, to paraphrase loosely, said, “The sky poured out love and the earth opened to receive it.” Amen, I thought, amen.

Yesterday Leo mowed my lawn and trimmed the edges. After letting my backyard orchard go brown over the dry, dusty winter and searing hot spring, a couple rainfalls and it looks like a park. Tomorrow, after another forty-eight hours of rain, the same lawn will look like a shaggy dog.

The gray-brown foliage on the mountains looming just across the highway, seemingly overnight mirror a vista of the hills of Ireland. Some of my plants have burst into flower like songs in the night. Some are waterlogged, blooms drooping to the ground.

Memories are strange. Now that I’m older with time on my hands, the time in my mind dredges up memories long forgotten. What I find strange, is that I have a clearer view of events in my life now than I had back when a lot of the memories were freshly implanted.  

I think I’m fortunate that some of my memories did not transform into cast iron monuments that then ruled my life. I had good teachers along the way.

People tell me things. One of my early customers had me transfixed by her tragic story of how her husband abused and left her. I couldn’t imagine how she could begin to want me here with her, contemplating a job. Innocently, I asked her when this happened; her story was so fresh. I couldn’t understand how she could function. “It was twenty-three years ago next month,” she replied through clenched teeth.  

“Oh.” Oh was all I could respond. That poor woman had lost twenty-three years of her life. She chose to stay in that moment. Realization hit me like a hammer. I never wanted to do what she did, to plant myself immovable in a past pain. I had not done so but it was still a good lesson to hang onto. I made my excuses and left.

I suppose some people don’t have ugly memories. I have plenty. And the uglies visit from time to time. Yes, I did that. I’ve sabotaged myself. I’ve made choices I knew would end in disaster to myself. Yes, that happened. Fortunately, today I can see details that I chose to ignore at the time. Those outer details make a difference.

As the more clear and complete picture emerges, I can see how to change my perspective. Painful memories aren’t as hurtful. The bad wasn’t all bad. Pieces of denial float away. The good wasn’t all good. “Ba ba ba ba boom.”

A lot, if not most, of my most cringe-worthy memories were made while looking for love (in all the wrong places). Like there was the time, ooh, naw, let’s leave that story on the shelf in storage for now.

Ironic that I live in semi-isolation, alone, among people, with whom I have little in common, and frequently have these strange experiences of feeling utterly and completely loved.

“Ba ba ba ba boom.”

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

June 17, 2021

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We Made Omelet, Mixed and Magical

We Made Omelet, Mixed and Magical  

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            Bacon and eggs are common base ingredients, but we created a different kind of omelet at Char’s the other morning, a “Friend Omelet”, made of ingredients (ourselves), old friends and new.

            I had no idea whether we could pull it off. I conjured the germ of an idea shortly after I spontaneously decided to fly to Montana. My little girl needed me. She was born in ’66, you do the math, but age is meaningless to a mother. And I wanted to see her new home.

Dee’s family moved into new digs two months ago: Dee Dee, Chris, Antoinette, four dogs, a cat, three guinea pigs, innumerable and varied chickens, a yellow lizard, a horse and an assortment of unpacked boxes. Now I know why she needed her mommy.

            But I digress. When I decided to go north, I constrained myself to a strict budget. Words mean everything, pun intended: “Strict budget” sounds much more acceptable than stone broke. I would not visit all my friends this trip.  

            Dee Dee said, “When I pick you up in Billings, let’s take a quick road trip to Havre. I’ve located an old school friend I’d like to see.”

            So, I wrote my long-time good friend Jane and asked her to arrange a breakfast gathering Saturday morning. I asked her to call two Havre women who write me real letters regularly. I knew that Jane knew Lee. In a letter, Loretta had wondered if her and Lee’s husbands had worked together at one time. Dee and her friend Cathi would join us too.

            What made this breakfast rather unique is that the ingredients, we people, were all strangers in some ways. I’d never met the women who corresponded with me. Dee knew Cathi from high school but had not seen her in too many years.

            Loretta said it best. “When Jane, a stranger to me, called, I thought, this breakfast meet is way out of my comfort zone. I won’t know anyone.” But she took a deep breath and showed up despite misgivings.

            We all arrived about the same time, full of hugs and glad-to-meet-yous and so-good-to-see yous.

            Coffee appeared. The young woman who served our table was so sweet and patient. We delayed ordering because we were too busy talking, laughing. Our good food took forever to eat between questions, stories, insights, and connections.

            Here is where our story gets unique. To be good an omelet must have ingredients whose flavors blend and enhance each other, right?

            Two ingredients, Dee and her friend Cathi, whom I recognized instantly, is Lee’s daughter. Now how about that! Dee and Cathi cornered one end of the table talking as though no time had passed.

Stir in a third ingredient, Lee. Now add my friend Jane. In the mixing, I learned that my daughter’s friend, also Lee’s daughter, Cathi, had, at one time, been married to my friend Jane’s son. What a mixed omelet! Keep in mind, I had no idea they all knew each other and were family.

Now to gently fold in a generous measure of seasoning. Loretta and Lee had known one another in the past. Indeed, their husbands had worked together. They had many remember-when type stories to share.

Oops! I also must jump into this omelet pan. Turn up the heat but not too high. Blended together, with no preconceived notions, we made a great omelet.

Having lived long enough to have no shame, we hung dirty laundry on the line. Our collective stories included the good, the bad and the ugly. Every ingredient is necessary to live life with full flavor.  

We sat down as strangers, discovered connections, shared experiences and stood up as family. Magical. Bizarre and magical.

           

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

June 6, 2019

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Ghosts of Fruitcakes Past

Ghosts of Fruitcakes Past

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            In the past three weeks my gal-friends and I have been unfolding Christmases we have known. We six women, who went through school together, keep alive a group email conversation began over ten years ago. We live in England, Washington, Montana, Oregon, California and Mexico.

            Our shared memories are similar. Details vary. Take ice skates. Some received new white leather skates wrapped and beribboned beneath the tree. Others wore big brother or sister’s hand-me-downs from the closet. We skated in Harlem at the old rink, ice over dirt, courtesy of volunteer firemen. Was it where the “new” post office now stands? We skated on the frozen Dead River, the Milk River and irrigation canals.  All agreed, we skated with pure grace and elan, to music only we could hear, waiting to be discovered, Olympic material. 

My daydream exploded the day I fell through an iced over air bubble on the Milk River. I was alone. I crashed through the thin skin of ice to land hard on the solid ice a foot or more below. I was alone. Nobody saw me. I felt terrified and humiliated. I limped home. I don’t remember if I ever skated again. Probably I did. Humiliation and sore bums don’t last forever.

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire was not part of our historical past. Chuck roasts chestnuts at the annual modern-day Harlem Christmas stroll and as far as I’m concerned, Nat King Cole can keep his chestnuts. Food was a big part of Christmas for all of us with lefse and lutefiske, Norwegian and Swedish cookies taking prominent roles at most tables. In my English family, we baked gingerbread, molasses cookies and decorated sugar cookies. We whipped up  batches of divinity and fudge, frosted cakes and baked pies. 

 

Generally entire families gathered for Christmas dinner, most often at Grandma’s house. Every mother and auntie brought her best creations and plenty. Everyone ate to bursting. You had to because Grandma kept filling your plate. Leftovers were wrapped and shared about, enough for days.  

School and church programs loomed large in our lives. We all participated, willingly or not. I’m still jealous of the first and second grade rhythm band girls who got to jingle the bells or shake the tambourines. Stuck in the last row with the taller boys, I banged two sticks together. I never did graduate from sticks. 

The best Christmas program memory came from England Karen. Before the church was built, Lutheran services were held in the basement of the old bank building. She was maybe six or seven. Herman Gebert, two years ahead of us, had a speaking part. In Karen’s words, “Herman calmly walked to the front of the church, turned toward us and promptly spewed the entire contents of his stomach on the floor. It was quite dramatic.” 

Floweree Karen remembers being a “holy terror”, threatened with lumps of coal and willow switches. One year her Mom sent her brother and sister to the drainage ditch to cut a swath of switches and put them under the tree. Years later Karen’s son Mike was born on Christmas Day and that helped heal the hurts. 

None of us had piles of presents. We tore the wrapping off soft flannel pajamas, a sweater set or saddle pants and usually a special toy, a doll, a wagon, or games and puzzles. A bicycle was a super-huge big deal. But the bicycle usually had to sit on the porch until spring thaw.  

Everyone has asked me, “What is Christmas like in Mexico?” Now I can answer. What I saw is that Christmas here is much like our past Christmases, when we imagine times were simple. Decorations are glitzy but sparse. Silver bells with red and green ribbon might hang from a door. But the yard is not cluttered with Santa, Reindeer, Frosty, Charlie Brown and fifty-thousand flashing colored lights wrapped around every available surface.  

The holiday focus in Mexico is on family. Church goers attend Midnight Mass or special Church services. The family gathers around plenty of traditional food, crab and shrimp serviche, cecina en adobo and pollo mole. Some families have a tree. My favorite was created with poinsettias. (My tree is made with six braids of smuggled sweetgrass.) Gifts tend to be clothing and one or two special toys or games. I’ve not seen a lot of toys for sale. The Mexican families I know have a long way to go to reach the excess we take for granted.

Memories are like fruitcake soaked in the brandy of time, made to nourish us today with new understandings of who we are and to remind us to cherish what got us here. 

But for the life of me, I cannot find words, to explain hookey bobbing on the icy streets of Harlem to my new friends. 

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

January 2, 2014

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Becoming a Local

Becoming a Local

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            Several Montana friends have asked me, please, to not comment about the weather while I’m down in this southern sunny clime. That seems a reasonable request to me since you, my friends, on the High Line are currently experiencing the annual return of the Ice Age. 

            It has always struck me that weather in Montana has a separate and distinct personality,  unpredictable in mood, even schizophrenic, of which one does well to be wary. Living up north, I was constantly on the look-out for its next meteorological move, almost afraid to open the door to see which mood was on my step. 

            In comparison, weather here seems actually boring, every day the same. Don’t worry. Be happy. The sun shines. The breeze wafts tenderly off the ocean. When it rains, the sky falls. Fifteen minutes later the sidewalks are dry. What’s to comment? (Remind me of this when the hurricane winds batter the city and/or in August when the mercury rises to 116 degrees Fahrenheit.) 

            Meanwhile I promise to keep my weather comments to a bare minimum. I have been told in the past that I have a tendency to gloat, an ugly quality, especially from your best friend whom you love dearly. I argued that I don’t gloat. I am eager to share my experiences. 

But, in respect, I will not mention that I check the Havre Daily forecast with a hint of glee. That would be rude of me. 

Now that I am practically a “local”, I feel competent to give advice about what to bring when you come visit. 

            Money, four cotton tops, four shorts, sandals and a pair of tennis shoes, underwear and a toothbrush. That about says it all. I presume you will wear one set of these items. That means the rest fits in a backpack with room to add a few small items I might request that I cannot find in Mazatlan. You will bring more, of course, probably lug a suitcase along, but it is unnecessary and you won’t wear more than those four cotton tops. 

            If you want your phone to work, add Mexico to your plan before you arrive. Then unless you want a four thousand dollar bill, hide the phone. 

            Lupe bought me a Mexican phone from Moviestar. Sounds exotic, does it not!  It’s just another phone company. He chose that one because they assured him they set the phone so everything would be in English. Voice mail, voice instructions, those things. That was our assumption. The actuality is that the phone allows me to speak into it in English, if I can get the call to go through. Everything else is in Spanish; voice mail, voice instructions, the folded paper of instructions that came in the box, tips, promotions. I know enough to figure Moviestar is trying to give me deals. 

            I would give you my number but you don’t want the charges per minute. Stick with email. Besides, if I heard my phone ringing, I probably wouldn’t remember where I hid it. Oh, just another minor detail—I have somehow brilliantly managed to lock out incoming calls.  

            Every block provides opportunities to eat, such as the little breakfast and lunch place on the corner a few feet from my apartment door. Yesterday I explored beyond my block, in search of a lavanderia. I found one just two blocks away, along with at least eight other eating establishments of various sizes. And a place to get my hair cut and nails beautified

            Between the laundry and my hair cut, a man named Rudy stopped me. “I remember you. You were at the Luna Palace.” I had purchased a raw opal from him. A good memory is as a polished jewel. It is flattering to be remembered. 

            Just last week on the beach Roger asked me, “Where is your ring?” Roger had sold me a ring with a Mexican agate two years ago. I never saw him last year. 

            Right before Evelyn flew back to Harlem, New York City, she and I were having a Coca-Cola at my corner comida. A man from Edmonton with whom we’d had a long conversation just the day before walked by not recognizing either of us. 

            “He didn’t even know us,” said Evelyn.

            “Well, we have to remember,” I replied, “to them we all look alike.”

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

December 5, 2013

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Ken's Portable Yard Sale and Other World Class Wonders

                        Ken's Portable Yard Sale and Other World Class Wonders

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            "Ken's Portable Yard Sale and Sushi" read the sandwich board propped along the street where Highway 2 slowed down through one of those small burgs past Spokane headed west. You won't see that on the interstate. I slowed down t to a rolling stop. The vintage Ford pick-up, possibly early 50's, spiffed up with turquoise house paint, was parked alongside an empty store-front. A suspect mattress flopped upright against the wall. A push mower, various tools, a brown recliner and sundry household goods were arranged helter-skelter. I've no idea where the sushi was, probably in a cooler on ice on the passenger side of the bench seat in the truck.

            Even as much as I have been craving sushi, I wasn't about to sample Ken's. I  looked, waved, grinned and moved on.

            Davenport has a motel in which each room is sparkling, cheerful and deliberately decorated in 1950's camp. Delightful! I know because I stayed there once. I hope nothing has changed I would like to stay there again. On that late night about five yeas ago, no restaurants were open But I walked across the highway to Safeway for an adequate deli salad, fruit and chocolate. I passed up the Safeway sushi also.

            Coulee City has a drive-in diner with twenty six flavors of soft serve ice cream.  The diner was closed when I drove through on Saturday afternoon or I would have had to try several flavors. Well, I had not had lunch. I like ice cream.

            Several years ago I left memories in Coulee City. My friend Kathy and I were driving from Harlem to Seattle. We pulled into town for breakfast in an old hotel, served in what once had been the bar. Two elderly gents (long white beards and cob webs in their hair) were playing chess. They may still be there. The woman who waited tables--and also cooked the meals--must have been pressed into service when the usual waitress, who maybe had danced on the tables at the real bar around the corner that previous night, hadn't shown up. (We made up excuses for our breakfast server's bitter attitude.) Kathy and I talked it over. We had a full tank of gas. We had full stomachs. So we kept out just enough cash to cross on the ferry from Seattle to the Olympic peninsula. We dumped the contents of our wallets onto the table, and left our sour-puss waitress with an eighty-seven dollar tip, just to change her mood. Kathy and I giggled about that for years. We wanted so badly to sneak back to see her reaction when she picked up her tip. I think of that morning every time I drive through Coulee City.

            In terms of obsolete high school team mascots, the Waterville Shockers would be a match for the Chinook Sugarbeeters. Sugarbeets have not been grown in the Milk River Valley since I was in school a "fur piece" back in the last century. None of the present generation of Waterville youngsters has seen a field with shocked wheat. We small towns celebrate our history. By the way, when did you last see a genuine blue pony?

            Waterville also has an architecturally wonderful hotel, beautifully restored. I stopped to get  a room but Saturday night the hotel was full. I drove on to Cashmere where I have another favorite place to stay. Had there not been a cancellation just minutes before I walked in the door, I would have been out of luck. The gentleman at the desk said every room from Wenatchee to Steven's Pass was booked. The sun had set. I gratefully paid the extortionist rate. As I lugged my bag up to my room I noticed a bevy of young girls in Bavarian costume. Hello--October. Every town along the way was in full swing Oktoberfest.

            Sunday morning I drove from sunshine and a vivid palette of turning-leaf colors, everywhere a calendar picture, across Steven's Pass to grays, greens and fog. I boarded two mini-cruise ships, the Washington State Ferries, from Mukilteo to Whidbey Island and across from Coupeville to Port Townsend and my friend Vidya.

            Today Vidya and I mulled over a rack of paint chips and I had small pots of paints mixed. While still in Harlem, I had blotted out the business logo on my van, leaving large fields of red. I had wanted to replace the logo with something, flowers or landscape or something but hadn't time before leaving. Finally I settled on a simple woven basket design. The circus colors I chose have transformed my van into a gypsy wagon. I like it. If I get lost on the next phase of my journey, I'll be easy to find.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

October 24, 2013

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