The Holway Family, Next Door Neighbors

When Oysterville was somewhat younger – maybe six or seven decades ago – and I was just a wee poppet, myself, I remember the excitement of coming here to my grandparents’ each summer. A big part of the fun was playing with the kids next door – the Holway kids!

Johnny was exactly my age (well, a week younger) and he and I were great friends until his younger sister Ruthie came along. Then, as I remember, we three played together for a few years – probably until Annie came along. By then, we girls were undoubtedly closing ranks against Johnny and the other boys in town, or vice-versa. I remember many hours spent down at the bay digging tunnels in the sand and sliding on the ballast rocks but I have few memories of boys being with us.

Sue Holway

And then, one summer, along came Susie. Soon, Ruthie and I considered the two younger girls tag-alongs and no doubt we tried to escape them now and then. When Katherine joined the family a few years later, I was so ancient as to be approaching my teens and my memories of her as a little girl are few and far between.

Now that I am teetering on the brink of my second childhood, it pleases me to think that Sue Holway still lives next door. It’s a lifetime later and both of us have lived other places. We no longer spend every free minute down at the bay hunting for baby crabs or building sand castles, but here we are in Oysterville, next door neighbors on a full-time basis! It’s not everyone who can say they’ve lived next door to one another for the better part of a century!

Today, Sue is talking at the schoolhouse – her turn to do one of the Oysterville Schoolhouse Lectures. Of all of us who have spoken there since the lecture series began a year and a half ago, Sue is the only one who was born and grew up here and who actually was a student in that very building.

Her topic today is “Oysterville, My Love” – the title suggested by Diane Buttrell, the series organizer, whose all-time favorite piece of Oysterville literature is a poem by the same name written in the 1990s (or maybe the 1980s?) by Sue — in her book Remember Where You Started From. Sue has been fairly circumspect about what she is going to say today and I know I’m not the only one who is eager to find out! It’s hard for me to believe that one of the ‘kids next door’ is giving this talk! It begins at 10 o’clock