A New Look

Sometimes it takes just one little finishing touch to make you know that you’re not in Kansas anymore. Or in this case, not in the Oysterville of long, long ago.

I am nostalgic about that far distant Oysterville. It’s the town full of blackberry bushes and oyster shell piles and warm-as-bathwater dog paddling in the bay – the Oysterville of my childhood. And that Oysterville is all mixed up with the bustling boom town of pioneer days that my grandparents spoke of and with the tumbledown town that my mother and my aunts and uncles remembered. In my mind I know it’s an Oysterville that exists no more. But my heart never did get along well with my head.

For forty years we’ve watched as the old buildings disappear. Fire took Ruby and Vic’s little cabin, the first meat market in town and it was a fire that destroyed Eddie and Lucille Freshley’s place a few years later. For the past fourteen years, their new place has functioned as the Oysterville Guest House.

Greenman House, 1984

The Greenman House on the corner of Oysterville and Territory Roads finally just fell in as did the Bardheim Barn– victims weather and neglect. Ditto the ‘Annex’ at the old Heckes Inn. My grandfather’s barn across the street from our house was dismantled to made space for the churchyard and the

And for forty years we’ve watched the replacements and the new buildings go up. Mike Parker’s house was one of the first. Then Polly’s and Ginger’s and the Jacobs.’ Bud and Carol built where there had never before been a house; ditto Jim and Leigh and the Kepners’.

Of the new places, the hardest for me to accept was the Hampson house just north of us. In my memory, the field there had always been an extension of my grandparents’ property, but when the family divided and sold it and there was suddenly a house right next door. I consoled myself with the thought that my mother could remember way back when the Stevens Hotel was there. Things change.

“Yards” have transformed into gardens culminating most recently in Bradley’s showplace across the street. Daffodils and daisies grow along the verges and roses climb the fences – all of which tourists help themselves to just as they once picked the blackberries that are still there in my mind’s eye.

Like all of us who have been here for a few generations, I’ve lamented many of the changes and applauded many more. But it wasn’t until the other day when I spied the new cupola at Bradley’s that all the differences that have happened over time seemed to descend upon me at once. Somehow, that one small, decorative element seemed absolutely foreign to the Oysterville of my soul.

I really did think I was on the other side of the rainbow… just like Dorothy.  I doubt very much if there is a Glinda-the-Good-Witch or a pair of ruby slippers that will help us get back.