As I stood at the gate talking with my neighbor Tucker the other afternoon, we heard the clip-clop of horse hooves coming up the street. Our conversation stopped and we both turned, watching and waiting. I’m sure we were both smiling. Such a familiar, though infrequent, sound in Oysterville can’t help but gladden the heart.
Just as it’s been a long, long time since there were enough kids in town to keep the schoolhouse open, it’s been fifty years or so since almost every family had a horse or two. In those days, the horses were for the kids of the family. Fifty years prior to that, of course, families had horses mainly for transportation purposes — but for kids, too, as one of our hundred-year-old photos of the Espy children shows.
As the horse approached, we greeted the riders – two girls who, it turned out, were riding through Oysterville ‘on their own’ for the first time. The horse, “a purebred thoroughbred” had been a present to the girl handling the reins – for her thirteenth birthday, she told us. She had ridden through town several times before with her mom but now she had permission to be on her own.
The horse, it turned out, would be thirteen, too, in May. “She was a brood mare,” we were told, “and now she is retired. Some of her foals have become champions.” The birthday girl didn’t think she would continue breeding the horse but… “maybe.”
She said she lives nearby and we said we hoped we’d see her riding through Oysterville often throughout the summer. “Oh, you will,” she assured us. Nyel came out of the house about then and joined us. He greeted the horse owner by name – one the perks of working as a substitute teacher is knowing the kids of the area – and joined the conversation.
Soon, girls and horse continued on their way. By then, we were all smiling – probably even the horse! Another neighborly interlude in Oysterville!
Tucked in an out-of-the-way corner on one of our library shelves are several very old and very well-used books of medical advice for home use. Occasionally, when I remember they are there, I enjoy thumbing through them just to see how far we have progressed… or not!
My mother, Dale Espy Little, was truly an amazing woman. She accomplished many notable things in her lifetime, not the least of which were spearheading the formation of the Oysterville National Historic District, helping in the foundation of the Oysterville Restoration Foundation, and working tirelessly to restore and, later, maintain the Historic Oysterville Church.
There is an accumulation of canes in this house. They are testimony, I like to think, to the numbers of people who have lived to old age in our family. Some of them, of course, have been used by young people and not all belonged to family members. Each has a story, though at least two have not revealed their secrets to me.
She had a colorfully painted cane from Mexico – much shorter than it should have been to be useful – and a brass-headed walking stick that was so skinny it probably would have snapped in two had she put any weight on it.
When I was a child, we counted the days until Santa would arrive. By the time I had children of my own, the media was letting us know how many shopping days we had until Christmas. Nowadays we are besieged by news of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” and this very morning my computer tells me it’s “Cyber Tuesday.”
Hanging from the closet doorknob in the north upstairs bedroom is an old hand-embroidered reticule, made no doubt by my grandmother during the months following her 1897 engagement to my grandfather. The little draw-string bag has definitely seen better days, but it and its contents were kept because “you just never know when this will come in handy.”
Celluloid collars came into fashion in the late nineteenth century. They were the practical and relatively inexpensive answer to maintaining clean neck ware. In those, days with limited and difficult laundry facilities, most clothing, including linen dress shirts, saw a number of wearings before finding their way to a washtub. Since it was the shirt collar that became soiled first, shirts were made as collarless garments, and men kept a supply of detachable and discard-able collars on hand.
In the beginning, these removable collars were linen but they were expensive items to be thrown out. Soon paper collars were developed but those didn’t last long and weren’t as flexible or comfortable. Celluloid (an early form of plastic) collars, developed in 1870, lasted five times longer and proved to be more flexible. They remained in fashion until ready-made shirts with collars and ‘modern’ laundry facilities caught up with each other fifty years later.
Once again, “Shoalwater Shenanigans” is all costumed and rehearsed and ready for presentation. It’s a new production of last year’s very well-received show about long dead people of the peninsula. I say “new,” not only because with live theater every show is new, but also because this year’s “Shenanigans” features some interesting cast changes plus one additional venue.
I think that I am one of the few people who really 
Dear Daughter: This has been election day and some way it has been strenuous. Thus began a letter written by my grandmother, Helen Richardson Espy, on Tuesday, November 3, 1914. She was writing to her oldest child, Medora, who was away at school. The letter continued:
The bedroom was the one in which all the R.H. Espy Children were born. As early as 1946 when my Uncle Willard bought the house from the R.H. Espy Estate, there was talk of making that change. However, my grandfather and his brothers and sisters all objected for sentimental reasons. It wasn’t until the last of that generation (Uncle Cecil) died that the change was made.
I have another photograph, taken about twenty years earlier, of my mother’s first cousin Barbara who was Uncle Cecil’s daughter. She is standing at the woodstove frying clams which is where I remember her being throughout my childhood! Of all the eighteen first cousins of that generation, she was the one I knew best and loved the most. I think my mother felt the same way.
Now that it is dark outside well after I get up in the morning and long before I retire each evening, my thoughts turn to my Grandmother Helen Espy. They always do at this time of year and especially when it is stormy. And even more especially when the power goes out which, thankfully, has occurred yet this season, but probably will.
It would be easy to assume that she was able to endure the lack of amenities here in Oysterville because she had never known otherwise, but that is not the way it was. She was raised in East Oakland, California where there were electric lights and gas heat in the houses and trolley cars on the streets. She and my grandfather had planned to live there always, but those pesky ‘circumstances’ beyond their control brought them to Oysterville in 1902.