Where The Well Was

     Yesterday I spent cataloguing and filing some of my grandmother’s letters to her youngest son, my uncle Willard.  They were written in the 1940s and ‘50s and were mostly concerning family matters, but occasionally there was a detail about Oysterville or about the house that came under the heading of New Information, at least to me.
     For instance, in a letter written in September 1947, she mentions that at long last, Oysterville has garbage collection and she comments that this will save a great deal of trouble for everyone. I know that sometime earlier than that, Les Goulter had designated a part of his farm property as a village dumping site and, as I recall Eddie Freshley, who worked for the county, used his equipment to put in a road to it.  I’m not sure if the “collection” my grandmother noted had to do with that dump site or not.  Bud (Les’s son) might know…
     Some years later, in August 1953, she wrote:
     The plumbers drove a new well going eight feet deeper, taking the depth to thirty-two feet.  The water level is low all over the Peninsula and ours was one of the many wells to go dry.
     It was pouring rain outside as I read that particular bit of information and I found it hard to believe that the wells on the Peninsula had ever gone dry – especially in those days of much less population.  On the other hand, the summer days of my childhood were always sunshiny – a ‘fact’ I’ve always attributed to wishful remembering.  Maybe my memory isn’t as faulty as I thought.
     In another letter written in that same period, she said that family members had been reminiscing about all the locations of the kitchen sink since they had moved into the house in 1902.  They had concluded “five.”  But she didn’t give any specifics.
     In my memory the sink as always been right where it is now – on the north wall of the kitchen.  And several years ago when I was reading earlier correspondence I learned that our present kitchen and dining room were completed in 1915.  So, I think it’s safe to assume that the sink has not been relocated for almost 100 years.  There have, of course, been new sinks in that length of time.
     I also know that when the family moved into the house, the kitchen was on the north side of what is now our library.  So that makes a second general location that I can identify.  But where the other three were remains a mystery… and probably always will.  Old photographs seldom show such mundane areas of the house.  “Everything but the kitchen sink,” you might say.