Alice and Dale’s two children were grown and had families of their own. Alice supported me as I was raising my daughter by myself. She listened one afternoon when I was at my wit’s end over some struggle or another. She calmly said, “She will be grown before you know it. It is all over very fast.”

In the middle of the challenges of raising my daughter, I really felt as though my life was going to be one continual hurdle after another. At that point, I was not finding much joy in being a mother. So Alice’s comment caught my attention. First, of course, I received it in a way different from the way she intended it. I figured she meant it wouldn’t be like this forever. But then, I grasped her true meaning. She was wistful and was letting me know that there was great happiness and meaning to be found right now in my life. I needed to appreciate my child and not feel I was waiting out her childhood.

Alice, from South Dakota, was a woman of few words. But she really reached me that afternoon. I began more often to appreciate my life as a mom. And she was right. It was all over in the blink of an eye.

When I lived in the duplex, I had become very active in the local neighborhood association. Portland gave much discretion to these organizations, allowing them to comment on zone changes, design guidelines, and development plans. I had always been interested in city planning, but I mainly joined the association because I thought it would be a good place to meet men. It was, but they were all married. I guess no single men thought that it would be a great place to meet women!

I had gotten to know a real firebrand in the neighborhood, Dale, and when I bought the single family house, I moved next door to Dale and his wife Alice. Dale headed the maintenance department for the local medical school-hospital complex, so he knew how to fix everything. In the years before Charlie, Dale was a life saver for me.

I first called on him when my lights went out. I needed to understand the fuse box and how to identify which fuse went with which circuits. When Dale arrived, he opened the box and gasped. Apparently, someone had left a wire exposed and I could have easily electrocuted myself. Fortunately, I had called him first when I was perplexed at the array of fuses. Since his first trade was as an electrician, he repaired it in no time and then explained how to identity circuits and what size fuses to buy.

And in the 18 years that followed Dale and Alice would be instrumental in our lives. Stories to follow!

Bill lived next door to Everett, also directly across the street from us. Bill was widowed during the time we lived there, after we had witnessed numerous ambulance calls for his chronically ill wife, Retha. Bill was so quiet he made the laconic Everett seem loquacious. Bill kept to himself, though not in an unfriendly way. I think, despite the fact that he had lived his entire life in Oregon, he would have been very at home in upper Maine.

Bill grew an enormous vegetable garden in the community garden plot near our homes. Then every summer and fall he canned all the bounty from his crops. He fed himself all year on food he had grown himself. He had told Everett once that after living through the Depression, he was never going to take food for granted. He went to bed about 6p.m. and rose at 3a.m., a habit no doubt from his factory shift days.

One summer day he invited Charlie, my husband, to go huckleberry picking with him. This was an unexpected offer on Bill’s part, and one Charlie immediately accepted. Bill had fashioned his own huckleberry cans from old paint tins with wire handles. Bill drove far into the timberline around Mt. Hood, traipsing farther than we knew Bill could go, to show Charlie the prime picking grounds. They picked bucketfuls of berries and brought them home to freeze. Bill also gifted Charlie with one of his buckets.

We came to believe that Bill, in his own silent way, was passing on his knowledge of these isolated huckleberry bushes to someone he knew would appreciate them. We thought the gift of the bucket reinforced our thinking. Of course, Bill didn’t articulate any such thing. He was a man of action, not words. But his actions that day told us we were valued as neighbors. And we saw the generosity hiding in his flinty exterior.