Della Zieske
Della Zieske lives alone in a wind-tattered little house that sits close to the beach on a large sand spit projecting into Discovery Bay on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Waters here insist on a year-round temperature of about 45 degrees, cold enough to turn a person into flotsam in fewer than 15 minutes. Seagulls, clams, and salmon love the cold water and foggy beaches. So does Della; she landed a 17-pound salmon a few months after her 100th birthday.
“I try not to catch them any bigger than I can carry.” She is 5 feet tall. Two fishing poles twice her height hang on her kitchen wall. The hooks are shiny and the lines neatly wound. The rest of the house has the abandon of an 11-year-old's room: unfinished projects are strewn everywhere.
“I'm not a good housekeeper. I have too much work to do." A National Geographic lies facedown on the table, the makings of cinnamon rolls clutter the counters, and a large unfinished quilt is suspended like an umbrella over most of her small living room. Her work does not include shooing a long-haired cat from the kitchen counter or cutting off a fledgling tree that has snaked up through a crack in the floor.
As the room temperature starts dropping toward that of the water outside, she relights her small wood stove, wrapping the kindling in newspaper as her "surefire" way of getting it started. With both hands she lifts a rusty gaff hook from a nail near the refrigerator. She's not using it to land a large fish this time but to drag in pieces of firewood.
“I couldn't live in a nursing home. They'd make me keep my room clean. I live here so I can do as I please. People visit me, and when they leave, it's all mine.”
The last of her four husbands died more than 30 years ago. "I've had some offers since then, but I wouldn't want to live with an old man, and a young man wouldn't want to live with me. So this is just fine.”
"I have some regrets. I divorced one of my husbands. He swore at his parents. I told him I wasn't going to be married to anyone who curses his parents.”
And that was that. She left him and never returned. But years later, while living with her next husband, she learned that her divorce had not been a legal one. "I was terrible. I was a bigamist. But we all have something to live down.”
"People always want to judge, but I'll tell you how I judge a person. Just ask him what he thinks of his neighbors. If somebody doesn't like his neighbors, you know there's something wrong with him, not the neighbors.”
"But you don't want to hear an old lady babbling on. Let me give you some blackberry jam I made. Now where did I put it?"
Della was a nurse for nearly 50 years, but she doesn't talk about health much. A pack of cigarettes and a half-filled ashtray have their places among the projects on her kitchen table.
"Oh, I didn't start smoking until I was 50, and most of the time I'm so busy I forget about them.”
"But I don't know how I got so old. I really don't know how this happened. I guess longevity runs in the family. My mother lived to be old. And I've never liked sweets. When I was a little girl, I gave my Christmas candy to the other kids. I never drank much either. But there's another thing. Luck. My third husband and I were walking along the street one winter. It was almost Christmas, and I stopped to look at some colored lights. He was just a few feet ahead of me when a car skidded on the ice and killed him. It could have been me, but it wasn't.”
Della has left a few pieces of newspaper on top of the stove. They start to smolder. She turns and brushes the glowing paper to the floor with a stick. There aren't any smoke alarms in this house, but she doesn't seem worried. The cat doesn't look worried either. They seem to be ready for whatever comes and against any odds—like that little tree easing up through the floor.
~ One Hundred Over 100, Moments with One Hundred North American Centenarians by Jim Heymen, Photographs by Paul Boyer, Copyright 1990, Fulcrum Publishing, 350 Indiana Street, Golden, Colorado, pages 2 & 3.
You can visit the memorial page for Della Lucinda [Vandiver] Zieske.
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