Lillie's Valley: In Search of the Good Life - Part 2 of 3

“We weren’t broke!” Marcia objects to how I ended Part One. “We just needed to get used to being paid only once a month. Remember we had jars to put money in for various things. And I borrowed 200 dollars from my sister Kathy, and we paid her back.”

“Ok,” I say. “But on that birthday, you wanted to make me cake for my birthday…”

“It was cookies.”

“Ok, cookies. But we had no money then. We were broke.”

Having arrived in the Pacific Northwest, we had only one marketable skill between us: Marcia was a fast typist. She managed to get a secretarial job in the Chemistry Department at the University of Washington. Once working in the department, she learned that one of the faculty had become editor of the journal Acta Crystallographica, a position that came with an allowance for an assistant to type correspondence. The job required only minimal typing skills, and through Marcia I got the job so that we were both employed.

The next challenge was finding a place to live. Even in 1975, paradise seekers flocked to the Seattle area. So many came that some locals resented the influx, particularly from the big state to the south. A popular bumper stick read “Don’t Californicate Washington.” The cost of living was high and rentals hard to find, particularly in our price range and with two dogs. We, though, were lucky to stumble on what we came to call “Lillie’s Valley,” a place we saw listed in a newspaper.

Not everyone would have been happy in Lillie’s Valley. You heard of “as is” used cars. This was sort of a “as is” rental. It was located in Edmonds, an upper middle-class city about 45 minutes north of downtown Seattle. As we drove along State Route 104, all we could see were homes set back from the highway on big, wooded lots, and we wondered where there could be any place here that we could afford. But then came a sign with three addresses, one of them the place we saw advertised. Pulling off the highway, we slowly descended on a drive that dipped down into a low area where two old houses stood a few hundred feet apart in acres of tall grass and brush. Then the drive rose back up, out the little valley, ending at a small cabin on a wooded bluff, the home of the land lady, a woman in her seventies called Lillie Sunday.

Her little valley had once been a farm. When the nearby freeway had gone through, she had somehow acquired two of the displaced houses and changed from farming to renting out the homes. She was a hardy old bird whose grandmother had come out west to Oregon by wagon train. She dyed her hair black and tied it back. She wore dark blouses and long skirts. Her cabin had power, but she heated it by a potbelly stove, and you could see her some mornings chopping firewood beside her house.

We thought the available rental was perfect for us. A porch stoop led to a large living room with a kitchen and mud room in the back and bedrooms off to the side. There was space for dog pen next to an old garage. Our neighbors in the smaller house were a young hippie couple that raised goats and sold unpasteurized goat milk.

The old house had been set on a dug-out basement where a furnace was placed that was fed by a fuel oil tank out back. As the fall arrived, though, and the nights got chilly, we noticed that the furnace wasn’t heating the house. So, like I did every time rent was due, I climbed up the incline to her cabin to see Lillie. Around the walls of her living room were strata of clutter, layer after layer of magazines, newspapers, knickknacks, lamps, and whatnot, all piled haphazardly on old chairs and dressers and stacked halfway up the walls or more. A small area was clear in the center of the room with an aging upholstered chair at one end, the stove and firewood in the middle and off to the side, and her televisions at the other end. The bottom tv was a four-foot-wide console model, a large portable tv rested on top of that, and crowning the pile was a small personal tv. None of them worked.

When I told Lillie that we had no heat, she said that she and her boyfriend would be down to fix it. I can’t remember the boyfriend’s name. He was an easy- going guy, sort of an off-brand Humphrey Boggart. He held himself like Boggart and had a deeply lined face with receding hair. He usually had a cigarette hanging from his lip. He said that he and Lillie like to go hunting together. They never managed to shoot anything, he said, but it was nice just walking in the woods. He pulled open the bilco doors and, flashlight in hand, disappeared into the rat-infested basement, like Boggart into the bowels of the African Queen. There was a lot clanging, but when he emerged the furnace was working, although it occasionally belched an obnoxious vapor that stunk up the whole house.

Our ancient electric stove was another item that worked less than ideally. We accommodated the nonfunctioning oven by buying a roaster, but one day the only working burner quit on us. Lillie said that she would take care of it. She stopped by one night while we were watching a game show on television and sat down to discuss the stove. We were going to turn off the set, but it quickly became apparent that she was so totally engrossed in the show that it seemed rude to turn it off. Eyes on the screen, she made a few disconnected conversational remarks. When the show ended, I suggested that we get to the stove. Going out to the kitchen, she lifted the top of the stove and immediately pointed out our problem.

“See there,” she said, “that wire has broken. All you have to do…” she said, “is just twist them together… and then turn the knob all the way up…” The thin, brittle wire ends glowed red and fused. “Now she’s working just fine. That’s all you got to do.”

The heating problem was not totally solved by the furnace working. There was no duct work. In the center of the house’s lower floor, a large hole had been sawed and fitted with a metal grate. The living room was always warm and the kitchen only a bit less so, but the bedrooms and bathroom were hopelessly drafty and cold. Fortunately, in the ceiling above the first-floor’s heating grate was another grate that allowed heat to flow up to the attic, and, placing our sleeping bags up there, we were comfortable sleeping when the coldest weather came. The bathroom was another story. We made our visits there as brief as possible.

It was primitive, but we were happy. It was a short drive to our university jobs. We drove to and from work on Interstate 5 with the Olympic Mountain range on one side of us and the Cascade Range on the other. Just a few minutes north on 104 was the Edmonds-Kingston ferry, gateway to unspoiled coastline and the recreational pleasures of the Olympic Peninsula.

THE END