Caecilia Fryrear and her husband, Jerry, enjoy being hosts at Carrie Blake Park. In fact, as Caecilia tells it, they’ve been trying to move to Sequim for a long time.
“We used to visit my sister in Vancouver, British Columbia, all the time, so we’d come up this way every summer, and we’d see Sequim and the sunshine and the lavender and the people were so friendly. When Jerry retired (from the University of Houston) in 2002, we decided why stay in Texas with the humidity and the mosquitos and the fire ants? You cannot go to sleep in Texas without your windows all closed up so you have to run the air conditioner and you never get fresh air.
What we liked the best I think was the fact that we could come up here and sleep with the windows open all summer long. You really don’t need an air conditioner up here.
We decided to build a house up here, but we couldn’t find the land we wanted. It was either too hilly or too close to town or too far away. So we ended up buying a house in Port Angeles.
We lived there for five years and then we looked in Sequim again and still couldn’t find what we wanted, so we went to Port Townsend. And the real estate was just booming five years ago, so we got a really good deal on a house in Port Townsend.
We thought we would remodel it and then sell it and hopefully make enough money to come back to Sequim to build that house!
What happened, as we all know, was that real estate took an enormous nosedive! We lost quite a bit of money on our Port Townsend house because we had remodeled and we couldn’t recoup the money we’d put into it. We decided to sell anyway and go back to Texas and be close to the kids.
We were in Texas in June and the heat and humidity were so oppressive that we couldn’t sleep. We had no energy, we missed the fresh air and we missed the mountains and we hated all the traffic. One day we looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s go back to Sequim.’
We got back in the RV and made the whole trip up here.
We’ve been here now in this area for 12 years and there’s nothing like it.
I’m still dreaming of that little cabin or cottage, but we’re doing great here. We have Carrie Blake Park and the mountains — what a view to wake up to every morning!
The people are so friendly. And seeing the young families with children is wonderful. When you think of Sequim, you think of people being retired, but there are a lot of young people here. And the soccer fields are incredible and all those kids out there — it’s a great place.”
Everyone has a story and now they have a place to tell it. Verbatim is a first-person column that introduces you to your neighbors as they relate in their own words some of the difficult, humorous, moving or just plain fun moments in their lives. It’s all part of the Gazette’s commitment as your community newspaper. If you have a story for Verbatim, contact editor Michael Dashiell at editor@sequimgazette.com.
