DIGGING IN
The only thing better than writing about gardening is gardening itself. As you can see, I do not labor alone. Dobby would be a bigger help if he'd dig the holes where I actually need them.
Here in my Pacific Northwest garden I'm determined to grow one of everything - excepting photinia, which is simply unspeakable. My garden consists of mixed borders, a large vegetable patch, an orchard, a woodland glade, countless containers, a greenhouse/potting shed, and very little lawn. Fortunately, my hobby provides both inspiration and practical experience for my profession. In addition to gardening topics, I specialize in home profiles, newspaper features, informal business correspondence, and community-based articles.
Over the past decade I have been privileged to write for Master Gardener magazine, Rainy Side Gardening, Northwest Garden News, WestSound Home and Garden, Home by Design magazine, Organic Gardening, and the Kitsap News Group. My humor column, On Kingston Time, appears in my hometown paper, the Kingston Community News. Miss Snippy - my opinionated alter-ego - can be found in Northwest Garden News.
I am a member of the Garden Writers' Association, and in 2008 was the proud recipient of a Silver Award in the newspaper category, and a Gold in electronic media. In 2009, I received an additional Silver Award for newspaper writing.
In my personal life, my husband Ted and I live on five country acres on the Kitsap Peninsula across Puget Sound from Seattle. We have three boys - the oldest, Spencer, away at college in Maine. In 2009, Alex commenced his higher education at the University of Washington in Seattle. Our youngest son, Will, has just entered the wonderful world of junior high.
To check out life in our small town of
Kingston, WA, see my columns, below.
They appear every other month in the
Kingston Community News.
Thanks for visiting!
Wendy Tweten
Words by Wendy
9990 Kingston Farm Road NE
Kingston, WA 98346
360 271-0575
How to Spend Summer Like a Boy
On Kingston Time
By Wendy Tweten
When the flying termites come around
Soon life at home will settle down.
-Ma Tweten
Farmers’ Almanac it’s not, but you parents out there know what I’m saying. When those little winged creatures appear, it’s time for our little creatures to spread their wings and go gnaw on someone else’s nerves for awhile.
Summer was fun at first, but lately all the boys can find to do is chase each other through the house, in one door and out the other, yelling and slamming as they go. It’s kind of cute when they’re six, but - for heaven’s sake - one of them is 17.
With a tear in my eye and a song in my heart I’ll be sending my baby off to a full day of first grade at Gordon Elementary. I hope Mrs. Faulk is an understanding woman. William has been raised amidst heavy levels of testosterone and a lot of teenage influence. She may be greeted, that first day, by a cheery, “What up, dawg?”
The boys enjoyed all the standard summertime activities. They watched the 4th of July parade, rode their bikes, worked for the neighbors, fished, went to movies and “shot the tube” at the slough – a typical Kingston-kid summer. However, it’s Spencer and his friends (a pretty creative group, most of whom have driver’s licenses and part-time jobs) who really seem to have grabbed summer by the throat and throttled it. To those of you unfamiliar with such things, I offer the following primer on how to spend summer like a teenaged boy in a small town.
-Buy a big block of ice, find a long, grassy hill, and go ice sledding. (This is best done on a REALLY warm evening.) Don’t take a change of clothing. If the group includes girls, ask one of them if you can borrow a pair of pants to wear home. Act nonchalant when your parents ask why you’ve come home in shiny pink track pants.
-Play hide-and-go-seek through the entire town of Kingston. Give your friends clues to your whereabouts via cell phone. Earn extra points if the police don’t stop to ask why you’re skulking in the bushes.
-When you discover that the girl in your car is embarrassed whenever you honk and wave to friends at the slough, drive all the way through town blasting your horn and yelling her name out the window.
-If you must ride through a parking lot in a shopping cart, at least choose a driver who is unlikely to trip and send you careening into the hardware store.
-Organize an after-dark game of flashlight tag at your house. Invite a couple of friends who don’t want to play flashlight tag. Invent a new game called “set off each other’s car alarms.” Look surprised when your parents send everyone home early.
-Take a walk with friends. When you see another friend’s car approaching, wave your rear end at him. Learn a really useful lesson when the car stops and your friend’s dad rolls down the window.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Besides, the boys just chased each other out the back door again and, if I hurry, I can have all the doors locked before they make it around the deck. Ah…peace at last.
Wendy lives in Kingston with her husband and three sons who always find a way back in. Reach her by email at wendy@wendytweten.com.
Extreme Home Makeover Comes to Kingston: the Dore Home, November 2004
On Kingston Time
By Wendy Tweten
Where do you draw the line between idle curiosity and full-blown obsession? I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure I crossed over sometime Saturday afternoon.
Until Sunday night, I’d never even seen Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The thought of a network reality show being filmed at the end of my road intrigued me – that’s all. A week ago, when huge convoys of trucks loaded with building supplies began rolling down our tiny rural road here in Kingston, and my daily runs took on a death-defying quality, I didn’t know Ty from Michael and had never given blue hardhats a second thought.
Blue hardhats, it turns out, are gold. And EHM shirts were the coin of the realm all over North Kitsap this past week. With a blue hardhat and an official Extreme Makeover shirt, you were in. Unfortunately, the hardhats ran out by Monday morning – probably because all VIP visitors given tours of the construction site had their hardhats signed by EHM celebrities and then took them home (the hats, that is, not the celebrities – though every female over the age of five would happily have taken Ed home).
Ed Sanders, the show’s latest member and a former host of Fear Factor England, is a doll. He loves to spend time with fans and, well, the accent alone would be enough. Michael, Preston and Paige were all very gracious. Team leader, Ty Pennington, was hard to find, spending three days of this project at a second EHM site in Denver. Rumor has it that Michael can sometimes be found napping on one neighbor’s couch, while Preston is not above herding another neighbor’s goats when duty calls. In fact, if the Dore’s house is not completed ahead of a neighboring goat shed (under construction by the owners), Preston has vowed to design and build furniture for the goats.
Sheer dumb luck landed me with a VIP pass. Centex Homes, contractor for this particular EHM, asked permission to put their wireless internet dish at the top of one of our 100-foot tall fir trees. Now, I have to question the wisdom of having your entire internet network, complete with video feeds, reliant on one little plug-in at a home that includes a six-year-old. Whenever William goes outside to play I have visions of him tripping over the cord (THE SYSTEM’S DOWN!!), plugging it back in (WAIT, IT’S UP AGAIN!), and eventually knocking it out altogether (AAAAAH!!).
With VIP pass in hand, I’ve been on-site every day so far. Getting to and from the home is like escaping a coup in a border town: I walk slowly up the line of waiting cars begging for a ride. Once on site, it's astonishing to see the progress of even a few hours. One morning bathtubs would be sailing through the sky suspended from colossal cranes; the same afternoon would find the siding in place, the roof on, and the plumbing complete. It was a spiritual experience for someone whose kitchen remodel is in its third year.
Tomorrow, some friends and I have been invited to work behind the scenes with designer Paige Hemmis and Ed. I don’t care if I'm cleaning toilets – I'm going in!
More than a thousand pairs of hands, many belonging to volunteers, will play a part in the Dore’s new home. North Kitsap has thrown itself heart and soul into the project with many organizations, businesses and individuals donating time and materials. It seems I'm not the only one obsessed.
Life in the Middle of Nowhere
On Kingston Time
By Wendy Tweten
Note: The episode of Extreme Home Makeover filmed in Kingston in November, 2004 aired two months later. We were amused to see the spin the producers put on the show including pretending the site was so inaccessable they had to come in by marine landing craft, and taking the ferry everywhere they went because - according to EHM - there's nowhere to shop on the Kitsap Peninsula (Kingston is rural, not Medieval). The show was a columnist's gift.
Mind the mudholes, Martha, and watch out for them bears ‘cause we’re in the middle of nowhere.
Why, just the other night, after gassing up my amphibious landing craft, I came inside for a spell of TV watching and there was Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, filmed at their “most remote location yet” in Kingston, WA. Now, the next time Hollywood comes to this neck of the woods, I hope they’ll give me a call because I’m pretty sure I can find them a way in that doesn’t involve all-terrain vehicles.
And Michael, darlin’…you may know your way around the interior of a house, but you need to learn how to read a map. First of all, out here in the sticks, catching a ferry to get from Kingston to Port Gamble is known as taking the long way around (we just hop on the highway and drive about six miles). Maybe the people on the bus sent him that way to serve him right for pronouncing “Poulsbo” so badly. Then poor Michael – a slow learner, apparently – goes across the ferry again to shop at the Kitsap Mall.
As it turns out, it’s a good thing Michael found himself on the other side of the water so often, or he might not have stumbled onto North Kitsap’s “Art in the Woods” studio tour (whose artists donated much of the new home’s artwork), which seems to have been magically transported to Seattle.
With all the time he spent on the ferries, Michael must know what he’s talking about when he says the Extreme Team’s bus was just too big for the ferryboat. It must also have been too big for the Tacoma Narrows and Hood Canal bridges as well as Highway 3. Guess that’s the price we pay for living in the middle of nowhere.
Life is good here in the middle of nowhere. On those rare occasions I go somewhere, I can’t wait to get back to nowhere. Somewhere has too many people, not enough trees. Give me nowhere with its muddy roads, dark night skies and fearless deer eating my apple trees. Out here at the end of the world the only gangs skulking in the shadows are the local raccoon robber bands with designs on the dog chow.
While it certainly appears that we live in the middle of nowhere, how can we be sure? Let’s check the tally:
Preston: “It’s off the grid.”
Michael: “Very remote; very rural.”
Ty: “The middle of nowhere.”
It seems we have a consensus – though Ty appears to be a King County voter, casting his ballot for “the middle of nowhere” no less than three times during the show.
Ed didn’t seem to feel as cut off from civilization as the others – except, of course, for his cuppa tea. Kathleen at Sacks will never again be caught without a tea bag and some hot water. Now, don’t get me wrong, I worked for Ed staining the bookcases-from-hell (the show didn’t exaggerate on this one, he really did pull a bookcase all-nighter) and he’s a super guy, but – for heaven’s sake – every tent on the work site had tea. I think he was just looking for an excuse to get off-site before Preston gave him another job.
Speaking of Preston, Kingston may be “off the grid” but that didn’t stop him from falling for one of the natives. Rumor has it he found blond, blue-eyed love right here in the land that time forgot.
Well, you know I could sit around all day swapping yarns out here in the middle of nowhere, but I have to warm up the ATV and head out to the trading post for supplies.
And, by the way, guys – even out here in the middle of nowhere we know what a yurt is.
A Slogan for Kingston
On Kingston Time
By Wendy Tweten
Remember “Where the hell is Kingston, WA”? Back in the 1970s it was the bumper sticker of choice for proud Kingstonstonians from Streibel’s Corner to Jefferson Beach. A decade or two later, thanks to local historian Harold Osborne, we became the “Little city by the sea” – even though Kingston isn’t a city and isn’t by the sea. Well, it’s a new millennium and the chamber of commerce says it’s time for a new slogan to express our community pride. I’m here to help.
So is Dave Hildebrand, owner of Sack’s Feed, who suggests “Kingston: Gateway to Eglon.” I know this because I saw it on the Sack’s Feed sign. Following Dave’s example I would like to submit “Kingston: Part of the Greater Hansville area.” We all know it’s coming.
Recently, my brother, Bill, and some of his friends wiled away many happy hours at a local tavern thinking up slogans for our quiet harbor community. So it will come as no surprise – considering the venue – that "Quaint town, odd bars" and “Drinkston: At some point you will end up here” bobbed to the surface. Then came “Kingston: Available on most maps,” and the simple yet elegant "Smell the Slough.”
Heads down, mugs in hand and pencils flying, the group coined the enigmatic, “Kingston: Look what the tide brought in,” the political “Kingston: A red town in a blue state,” and the hopeful “Most of the time we have electricity." As a local, I’m not sure if I should be insulted by “Kingston: America is just a ferryboat ride away,” but I’m willing to concede that life in Kingston is “Simple, and we like it that way.”
After penning “The anti-Bainbridge” (more on Bainbridge to follow) they began shooting fish in a barrel with the town’s major export: ferry traffic. “Land of the ferries,” has a nice ring to it. Then we have "Come for the ferry, wait in the lines," and “A moment in time in a holding lane." Not bad. To those, however, I will add, “Kingston: Where rush hour happens every 40 minutes” and “Where the slugs race and the traffic crawls.” That should bring the tourists flocking in.
I suspect that when Bill and friends came up with “Kingston: A quizzle hizzle in a bizzle wizzle” it was pretty near closing time.
Let us now return to the island. I feel I’ve covered the bases with “Kingston: Like Bainbridge, only 40 percent cheaper,” or, simply, “Kingston: Bainbridge-lite.”
Let us not forget Kingston’s notorious shortage of bacon-and-egg fare, which inspired “Kingston: Hope you’ve had breakfast.” No worries, with one dozen espresso bars we make up for it by being “Kitsap’s most caffeinated.” (By the way, did you see the new Windermere building is advertising space for a coffee shop? Thank goodness…I don’t know about you, but my caffeine level always dips dangerously low in that mile-long stretch from Jumpin’ Java to Smitter’s Jitters).
How about “Kingston: Visualize a Village Green”? Or “A 25-mile-per-hour town in a 60-mile-per-hour world." Or “Come for the skate park, stay for the senior center” (food for thought). One of the slogans put forth by the official committee, “Kingston: Close enough to get away” could be punched up by adding, “But you can’t, so don’t bother to try.”
“Kingston: No landing craft necessary” (an Extreme Home Makeover reference). “Kingston: Banana slugs big as wiener dogs” (that’d put us on the map). How about “Kingston: Stay for a lifetime, or stay for a two-boat wait”? I don’t know, maybe we could just fix the tried and not-quite-true by changing “Little city by the sea” to “Little community by the cove.” There. No need to thank me, business leaders of Kingston. Just doing my job.
Wendy lives in Kingston with her husband, three sons, three dogs and an armada of slugs as big as wiener dogs. She extends special thanks to Bill and friends for sacrificing their brain cells for the sake of her column. Reach Wendy for comment at wendy@wendytweten.com.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia V?
On Kingston Time
By Wendy Tweten
It was a dark and stormy night, wrenched from the very bowels of a November twenty-seven years ago. Shortly after sundown the wind surged, whipping Apple Tree Cove to white-capped froth; on the open water the swells topped eight feet. There was no telling if the icy prickles that filled the air were wrung from sky or sound as winter’s rimy teeth gnawed at the rapidly fading autumn.
In the midst of the gale, a vintage vessel rode the waves like a seagoing ghost roused from some by-gone era. Once the pride of the Puget Sound’s Mosquito Fleet, the steamship Virginia V now served as a charter craft. This evening she was packed to the gunwales – overloaded, some would say – with 240 merrymakers, including a wedding party and most of Kingston’s business leaders.
The date was November 29, 1980. Ronald Reagan had just been elected to the White House. John Lennon had nine days to live. Closer to home, Kingston’s volunteer firefighters had organized their first – and last – holiday fundraising cruise aboard the old steamship. For a $15 ticket, participants were promised hors d’oeuvres, live music, a full bar, and the romance of travel aboard an authentic working steamship. The pre-cruise promotion in no way prepared passengers for the evening that lay ahead when the boat departed the Port of Kingston that stormy Saturday night.
As the Virginia V circled the cove the band began to play and happy passengers rubbed elbows at the buffet. Champagne corks popped at the 65-member wedding reception. Conversation was lively and spirits were high as the boat turned toward open water.
Now, it could have been the churning seas outside the harbor that caused the boiler tube to break, or it could have been plain bad luck, but break it did. Rounding Jefferson Head, the steamboat shuddered and stalled. Just as one partygoer suggested the band play The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the cargo doors to either side of the entertainment deck burst open and water flooded the dance floor, soaking musicians and guests, and washing the cocktail weinies out to sea. As the crew rushed to secure the doors, the lights went out.
Dead in the water, without heat, light, or backup power, the party had become a bona fide emergency. For a tense half hour the lights of Jefferson Beach grew steadily closer.
The tugboat Matilda Foss cut loose a log boom and rushed to the scene, arriving in time to save the Virginia V from running aground. The ailing steamship was then towed to the relative calm of Port Madison Bay, where she was moored to a buoy. As midnight approached, the bride exchanged her satin gown for a pair of coveralls from the engine room. Christmas lights powered by a small generator were the only source of illumination, and they brought a crazed gaiety to an already surreal experience. Many of the soggy and dispirited passengers – deciding it was no colder and wetter outside than in – straggled onto the deck to see if the next act of the drama would be comedy or tragedy.
The answer, when it came, was both.
The ferry Walla Walla, diverted on its last trip to Seattle, pulled protectively into the periphery of the crisis. But securing a ferryboat to a steamboat in a storm is out of the question – like harnessing a rodeo bull to a circus pony. So the big boat simply watched and waited. Time passed. The captive ferry passengers glared at the cause of their hijacking. Finally the ferry crew, motivated by boredom, launched a lifeboat. From out of the dark, choppy water – dwarfed by the waves and pushed back by gale force winds – came the tiny craft, rowed by the crewman who drew the short straw.
When at long last the lifeboat arrived, four desperate passengers scrambled aboard. Off went the little boat into the teeth of the tempest. The lifeboat made three trips that night. In three hours it shuttled 12 passengers.
It may be darkest just before the dawn, but that was the hour when the passengers of the Virginia V saw salvation slicing through the waves in the form of the David Foss, the pride of the Foss fleet. In less than an hour the tug had transferred all the passengers to the bright safety of the Walla Walla. As the evacuees gulped hot coffee, the ferry headed to Seattle to conclude the captive ferry riders’ four-hour crossing.
A pale sun had risen by the time a half dozen school busses arrived at the Bainbridge Island terminal to collect the bedraggled passengers. In the end, though seasickness and discomfort were the worst of the experience, those who rode out the storm aboard the Virginia V will never forget that cold autumn night when the gales of November came slashing.
Wendy Tweten is a Kingston native who survived the Virginia V (and too much Gordon Lightfoot). Reach her for comment at wendy@wendytweten.com.
ABOUT ME
Including selected On Kingston Time columns
Words by Wendy
