The View Outside My Window

Thanksgiving 1965, my mom and my cousin Gae were alone in Gae’s kitchen. The buzzer on her counter sounded and Gae rushed to the oven door, looked through the glass window and announced, “The turkey looks done. Yell down the stairs and tell everyone to come up to the table.”

With that, she opened the oven door and with her mitts on, reached in and pulled out the heavy bird. As she turned toward the counter, the roaster pan tipped slightly and the turkey slid off hitting the floor. It slid over to the far wall.

Mom and Gae stared at the turkey in shock as it lay on the floor, both unable to speak. Then, since there was no plan “B”, Gae dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor, picked up the turkey, set it back on the roaster pan and looked at mom.

“That never happened,” she said, and both howled with laughter.

The same laughter I am listening to right now as she recounts the story 60 years later. Together we are sitting at her kitchen table drinking coffee and remembering stories from old.

Outside of the picture window next to the kitchen table we look out over Erie Valley. In the valley is the small Lake Erie Store. It is basically unchanged, the same store that I visited for penny candy as a boy. The store sits alongside Lake Erie which amazingly enough has not been overbuilt with lakeside homes. Across the valley and always keeping watch over her home, sits the stone face of majestic Mount Erie.

“I sit here for hours some days just enjoying the view and remembering my family’s life in Erie Valley.” she says.

Though my mom was Gae’s aunt, she was only a few years older and the two grew up as close friends in Anacortes, Washington. Later when they both married and had children, we all spent much time together having sleepovers and picnics at the many beaches on Fidalgo Island.

This year Gae is 93 years old. She literally has the energy of the Energizer Bunny on speed. I held out my hand to help her down the front stairs. She ran around me like she was a 30-year-old. It is obvious the number 93 means nothing.

As a child, I remember her with wavy light brown hair. Now it is beautifully long, straight and silver. I asked her when she thought her hair turned silver.

“I’m pretty sure it was 8 kids, 21 grandchildren, and 32 great-grandchildren ago,” she giggles. “With a group that big, there is always someone to worry about and always someone to pray for. And oh, I have a great, great, grandson on the way too.”

Gae and her husband Hollis had two boys and six girls. The kitchen was always operating, and the bathrooms had a line. The boys were off creating and building, and the girls excelled in music, the arts and looking pretty.

A unique feature of the Dunton women is their laugh. When we visited for the holidays, the males stayed in the basement watching football. The women congregated in the kitchen. It seemed like the favorite pastime, while they prepared the meal, was to tell jokes. As a joke was being told, the laughter and giggling would start like a rising wave until it reached its peak and filled the upstairs. The males in the basement would look at each other like, “What was that?”

As I chat with Gae, her cell phone buzzes. She looks at the screen and proceeds to text with both thumbs at the speed of a fast talker. All day long she chats with her extended family. She also lets me know that even though she makes breakfast for anyone who shows up in the morning, she cannot remember the last time she made dinner. Each night of the week she is invited to a family member’s home to eat. She also says that she remembers the names of every grandchild and great-grandchild. This woman’s mind and body refuses to slow.

I remember that her basement used to have a kitchen, TV area, a bathroom, and some bedrooms. Then it happened that Gae decided she would like to earn some extra money. She found she had a knack for sewing draperies so she started her company, Gae’s Draperies, which now takes up most of the basement. With the help of daughter Jen, five days a week for the last 50 years, they have made drapes. Even as we talk, she says she has a five-month list of orders waiting. Other kids and grandkids are on standby to install them in homes in a fifty-mile radius of Erie Valley.

But there is more to life than work, there is music. Gae plays flute, violin, upright bass, piano, and organ. Daughters Jen and Bev became extremely popular with their “Dunton Sisters Bluegrass Band,” Jen playing guitar and Bev playing mandolin. In the back of the band on the upright bass is Gae. The band has played from Ashville to Nashville and all around the Pacific Northwest. When the Dunton women are not playing Bluegrass, they are playing classical flute, violin, and bass for weddings and dinner parties. On Sundays, Gae will play the piano, organ, and sing at her church. That is the way it has always been. Ever since she was a young girl.

As I sit and we laugh together, I notice a worn Bible next to her easy chair. I know how much her Lord means to her.

“Every week we have our online Bible study,” she tells me.

I wonder to myself, “How does a 93-year-old woman know how to participate in a Zoom meeting when my granddaughter has to show me how to do it?”

As our chat draws to a close, I look at this wonderful, beautiful woman and I imagine what stories she could tell of joy and sadness from her 75 years of living in this house and staring out this kitchen window.

I say to her as I look across the valley into the face of Mt Erie, “Gae, are you ever amazed when you look out this window?”

She replies, “The view outside my window. Every morning that I stand here looking at the mountain, thinking about Hollis and all the memories that I have from this home. I say: Thank you, thank you Lord for blessing me! You have given much and filled my heart to overflowing.”

I am honored to be her cousin. Gae will always be loved by me and a reminder that age is no limitation to your gifts, skills, joy, love of family and love of our Lord.

(All photos for this story were taken by Barry Brower, Anacortes, Washington)

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