This weekend will be the nearly world-famous Ryderwood Garage Sales. The Town will be bustling with shoppers galore and we hope they’ll find just what they need to take home with them. Look for signs and cruise the alleys to find all the treasures. There will be maps available at the Café, Women’s Club and Community Hall and around. Stop by the Café for coffee and plan to have a jumbo hotdog lunch at Community Hall – (11 a.m. – 2 p.m.)
This week marks 10 years since my husband and I embarked upon the last adventure we would share together: We moved to Ryderwood, Washington from Princess Anne, Maryland. Put another way, we moved from the end of one dead-end State Highway to another.
The reason for this life change was to retire near enough to Vancouver, Washington to watch our grand-boys grow up. Having a son to visit in Arizona erased any fears of Washington winters. The daughter’s response was “I’m not sure you can afford to live here”, but “living poor” was nothing new to us. We thought we were still young to take on another “fix-‘er-upper out in the boonies” – talk about denial!
Instead, some angel plucked us up and dropped us in Ryderwood, and I’m here to tell you that it’s been a perfect fit. My husband developed Alzheimer’s and I can’t imagine anywhere else where he could have maintained such independence and quality of life. He was out walking the evening before he died – he would have been totally homebound anywhere else. And as his caregiver, I would have been, too. I can’t describe the sense of “home sweet home” that I have living in Ryderwood.
That being said, I am very pleased that our community’s legal strife has been settled. Life is good in Ryderwood. On the hokey side: “Let there be peace in the valley.”