I met Julia and Ted on a walk around the neighborhood. We were greeted by their yellow Golden Retrievers, 15-year-old Shem, who looked at us soberly, and 11-year old Daisy, who is still young enough to want to get physical with everybody she meets. Julia and Ted have trained them well; Daisy crouched beside her owners, whining to let us know how hard it was to restrain herself. I took pity on her, and, with Julia's supervision, I petted her nose and said hi. That seemed enough for her.
"Do you read?" Julia asked me. I didn't answer, not sure what the question was.
She realized the awkwardness of her question, and rephrased. "We have a book club in the neighborhood, ladies who meet once a month."
I jumped at the chance to meet people hidden in the woods around me. It was the first time I had heard the half-hidden houses, perched on slopes or nestled in the trees, described as a neighborhood.
DBV Book Club meets on the first Tuesday of the month. I missed February because of babysitting duties, but made the ones in March and April.
Ted is undergoing radiation for a growth in his lymph nodes, so Julia missed the March meeting. We met at Linda's house, a pleasant middle-aged woman who is a native of the Northwest. I met Sylvia and Amy, who recently built a small eco-friendly house down the hill from us. I recognized Sylvia as the waitress who had served us the last time we were at our favorite restaurant in Port Townsend. Peppered ahi, grilled rare, is the specialty. To die for, is my assessment. Too peppery, says Mike. But he finds other things.
Linda went next door to help her next-door neighbor, Ingrid, over to her house. Their houses are very close together, which happens here. Because of the ruggedness of the terrain, houses are restricted in where they can be built. Several houses might be built close together in a flatter area, surrounded by steep hilly wilderness.
Our first book was "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness," about a British family who lived in Kenya and then Rhodesia at the time of the crumbling white imperialism in Africa. This could be touchy, I thought. It could bring out flaming red or bright blue opinions. But everyone stayed diplomatically neutral, which meant the book wasn't really discussed in much detail.
We met at Julia's house this month, where I also met Margaret for the first time. She announced to everyone that she had decided to change her nomenclature to "Meg." Her mother had refused to let her be known by a nickname in school--I could relate to that! But after years of being called Maggie by friends, she had decided to be addressed "Meg."
After telling my story in some detail, as "the new girl," I asked to hear their stories. Everyone seemed a little reticent to tell their own backgrounds. Sylvia continued what I had heard last month (Amy had stayed home, after several tiring days of work), that they had lived some 20 years in Hawaii, then sold out and came to Washington for their retirement years, because Hawaii is so expensive. Hawaii must be exorbitant, if Washington is cheaper by comparison. Linda is from the northwest, and had a more ordinary story, with fewer sharp edges.
I asked Ingrid when she came to the United States, and she said with a laugh, "Before you were born!" She was right. She came in 1952; I was born in 1953. She said little, unless she was directly addressed, because she is hard of hearing. She hasn't been too happy with the reading selections, I suspected, wants to read lighter things.
Meg told me she was from Tennessee, and had moved around with her military husband, until he got a "replacement wife." After a difficult divorce, she is now happily married.
Julia's parents divorced when she was a child. Her mother became a missionary and took her daughters to Japan. Julia lived in Japan from the ages of 7 to 17. It gives more meaning to the wonderful Japanese garden she has in her back yard.
These stories will probably be rare in the future, offered to me because I was new. I think I like that. Nobody asked me about my wobbling gait, which was a relief. I don't know exactly what's wrong with my legs, and I get tired of fielding questions. Let other people tell you what they want you to know, and you find out plenty.
The rest of the discussion was about plants and animals. Everybody has gardens; everybody has problems with the rabbits and especially the deer eating everything. Julia proclaimed that no spray worked. Nobody mentioned fences; it's hard to fence in the untamed wilderness we live in. Besides,with the size of the hind muscles on these mule deer, they could jump a 10-foot fence. Not an exaggeration. My solution so far is to chase them away when they venture across the road. They spend a lot of time in a cleared field directly across from our house. Yesterday I walked down our driveway to the road to head them off. One went back to munching grass, looking at me like a pre-schooler eating his vegetables while eying the forbidden dessert. The other loped around, looking for some way to get past me. That's when I noticed the powerful muscles on its hind quarters. It walked like a sumo wrestler, impeded in ordinary movement by the enormity of his limbs.
Julia said she had put netting over her roses, and hadn't seen any more damage yet.
"Won't the birds get caught in the netting?" someone asked. Ah, yes. We are environmentally friendly here. Animals before plants, the nurseryman wrote on his blog when killdeer laid eggs in his plants, and business--all the business of humans--is last. We are the intruders here, in one of the last remnants of the frontier left in the contiguous United States. It's kind of exciting at times. Then other times, you ask, "Why can't they build more bridges across the Sound?"
I volunteered to have May's meeting at my house. Then I'm moderating the discussion in June, of a book I suggested--"The Cat who Covered the World." A nice, fun book that will avoid all discussions of politics, divorce, and cancer.
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