When I get stuck, I think of Edith Olson.

Edith Olson, Dale Little at Edith’s 90th

Edith Olson was a life-long friend of my mother’s and, come to think of it, a life-long friend of mine.  Although she was older (by seven years) than my mom, we had a lot in common, starting with Oysterville and our roots here.

Edith was the granddaughter of I.A. Clark, co-founder of Oysterville with my great-grandfather, R.H. Espy.  Although neither Edith or I grew up here, we were associated with the village all our lives — visiting relatives, being “summer kids” and, eventually living here full-time.

In the thirties, Edith and her husband rented the Bard Heim property at the north end of town and raised dairy cows.   I barely remember her from those years — a tiny woman with a tiny voice and sparkling blue eyes and a heart bigger than all outdoors.   Edith ran the farm by herself during the forties when Martin went off to war.  When he got back they left for the wilds of Alaska to homestead in the Matanuska Valley.  My folks and I were in California but, even during those years, our families saw one another now and then.

After Martin died, Edith moved back to Oysterville — this time to Surfside, as close as she could get to her beloved ocean.  That was in the mid-seventies and, when I moved here full-time in 1978, we resumed our friendship.  First she “toured” me around to the places she thought important — to North Head but not to the lighthouse.  She wanted me to see the woods and to make sure I could identify the indigenous plants — ocean spray and red hucklebetty and a host of others.  (I could and she gave Dorothy Elliott and my years at Camp Willapa high marks.)

Edith took me in her jeep up the beach and over the dunes into the old Hines Ranch where we had a picnic and she talked to me about how it was here when she was growing up and later, when she was raising her family.  One summer we went up to Alaska so she could show me “her” Matanuska Valley and introduce me to the Wasilla Library which she had been instrumental in starting twenty-five years before.  Her book, “The Library and I,”  published in 1988, was the story of that experience — and of so much more about those pioneering years when Alaska was working its way toward statehood.

Too, Edith wrote for the Chinook Observer, much as I do today.  She wrote about happenings in Oysterville and she wrote about the history of Pacific County.  It got so she asked that I call her before coming by to visit.  Writing had become more difficult for her, she said, and if she was in the middle of something, she needed to stay focused.  “It used to be that the words would just crawl up my back and over my shoulders and land on the page,” she told me.  “But that doesn’t happen so easily now.”

Oh my, Edith!  I know the feeling!  I wish I could share a cup of tea and talk with you again — in person, I mean.  About what used to be and what is changing and about trying to capture some of it for posterity.  As it is, though, I am ever grateful for all the time we spent together and the introductions to your world, so generously shared.

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