Sydney and Johnny 1939

Among my earliest Oysterville memories – indeed central to them – are the summer days I sped across the lane from my grandparents’ house to “Johnny’s.”  He was exactly one week younger than I and was the oldest of the five Holway kids.   Of course, he was a boy so when his next youngest sister was old enough to play with, Johnny and I included her as well and before long she usurped his place as my first choice of playmates.  Then came Annie and Susie and Katherine, although the youngest girls were never quite playmates in the same way – much too little!

We always played at their house – never mine – which was undoubtedly due to the fact that my grandmother was blind and, though she could manage the household and one small granddaughter, having the neighbor kids in was no doubt beyond her.  On the other hand, Virginia and Ted had an ‘open door’ policy, or so it seems to me in retrospect.  My first visits were in 1938 when Johnny and I were two, and my mother probably accompanied me on my outings that summer.

Wirt House, 1939 – as seen from the bay

By the next year or so, I think I went across the lane by myself.  Theirs was the old Wirt House – a small two-story cottage, really, with an enclosed back porch where there was a toilet which probably had been added as soon as electricity and indoor plumbing ‘came in’ in 1938.  I remember that the porch always smelled of apples because Ted got them by the boxful from someone in Eastern Washington.

I don’t remember knocking.  I do remember going right in the side door which opened into the dining room.  I don’t know if the family ate there, but I do remember that Virginia did her ironing there.  And she had a mangle!  I thought that was about the most fascinating household appliance I had ever seen!  Virginia mangled EVERYthing.  I remember watching dishtowels and girls’ pinafores and Ted’s overalls and tablecloths go through that mangle and come out as flat as pancakes on the other side.  How I wished we had one.

Holway House 1949

Another thing – they had a swing set in the backyard and there was always some interesting game to play out there.  One year we set up hurdles and had ‘track meets’ which Johnny with his long legs always won.  When it rained, we played records inside and danced to “The Irish Washerwoman” which I think was more like galloping in rhythm up and down the living room.  Sometimes we went upstairs and played board games or dress-up and Virginia let us hobble around in her high heels.

By the time Johnny and I were in high school, the Holways were building a new, more commodious house.  My grandmother wrote to my uncle Willard that it was the finest house on the Peninsula.  It still sits right across the lane just about where their first house was.  But, by the time it was completed, I was much too sophisticated and grown-up to go bursting in without knocking first.  I always went over to ‘pay a call’ when I was in Oysterville, of course, and Virginia and Ted always made me feel welcome, though the ‘kids’ and I were beginning to pursue other interests and we couldn’t quite recapture that early childhood spontaneity.

These days, Sue Holway lives in the house.  There is something special about having neighborly memories for more than sixty (or seventy!) years!  Right across the lane!