One of Viva Village’s many public images has been enhanced vastly during the last year-plus, thanks to Suzanne Boyd, diligent originator-cum-custodian and the tech brains behind Viva Village’s Facebook page. Her scouring of various sources provides postings to inspire and enchant the Village’s Facebook “Friends,” swelled in number to over 200 at this writing.

Suzanne’s imaginative research is ever beamed to unearth items to promote diversity, volunteering, and lifestyle inspiration for those past middle age—topics to keep the momentum of the Village in high gear and to connect the membership.  

Viva Village’s Bonnie Barksdale provided the initial impetus for Suzanne to become involved with the Village, though our FB page wasn’t even a gleam in its mother’s eye. Bonnie and Suzanne were neighbors; Suzanne, not of the Social Security crowd at all, with three children under 10, wanted her trio of “Smalls” to have a bit of, uh, intergenerational contact. And so Suzanne came to a Viva Village meeting, probably with a Rent-a-Geezer notion in mind. The next thing she knew, she had volunteered to produce a FB page and Viva Village was on the fast-moving social media bandwagon.

Her new home now finds her even farther from the madding crowd than where she first met Bonnie. Picture

   
sprawling acres of lawn in an evergreen aerie in the Bald Peak area, boasting views of faraway Forest Grove, with an enviable hilly surround. There, Suzanne home-schools her children four days a week (on Tuesdays the children attend a nearby school), a labor of love that also requires off-site meetings with other home-schoolers’ parents, field trips, and an elaborate and varied curriculum. Home schooling under Suzanne sounds pretty 24/7. But it’s still her official day job, even if far from her IBM career of the past in Dallas, TX, as a staff analyst.

Color Viva Village lucky to have wooed Suzanne into its aura. 

And check out the Village FB page on line by going to
Viva Village Facebook.

You don’t have to be a Facebook member to savor the delightful compilations of our inventive Facebook guru-ess.

Not Your Grandmother’s
Book Club
(assuming she had one)

A record nine, count ‘em, clustered around Rae Coleman’s friendly farm table on the eve of June 1 to parse a holocaust/Vichy France heartbreaker, The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah.

For the assorted newbies to the Viva Village bi-monthly group, held at various homes, it was a peppy introduction to still another of the Village’s burgeoning social possibilities, as the Village moves toward its pre-launch in October.  The group began last year and is poised to continue—with choices literary and otherwise (one cannot live by Proust alone, whew.)

The format was democratic and to the point. Everyone did a précis of reactions to the WW2 novel that has captured the hearts of millions since its 2015 release.  (No English Lit class background for this group, although it was informative that Kristin Hannah is a Seattle-ite, because The Nightingale begins on the Oregon Coast.

Reactions to this examination of two French sisters’ lives during the Resistance were impassioned. The resilience of children, the courage of WOMEN (yes!), the elegant fluidity of prose and searing details, and the reality that this saga is very much alive today in other permutations—these were some of the comments.

Remembrances of things past were not absent, a number of the group sadly nostalgic over their own WW2 memories. The minor deprivations in the US at that time shrank rapidly in import when the draining demands of French life in the 1940s were considered.  So there was much for everyone to contribute.

Looking ahead, the VV group plans a variety of titles for summer and fall: July, The Gift of Caring by Marcy Cottrell Houle, MS and Elizabeth Eckstrom, MD, MPH;  Blood Money (eye-opening study of the billionaire Koch brothers' "doings") by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer for August. The Book Thief, the story of a young Jewish girl and the German family that absorbed her into their family in a small German village in 1939 is the September read, and in November Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl.

The Washington Co. library has a number of these titles available for book clubs in a kit that can be reserved before hand, but it’s prudent to pounce as soon as a planned book is nominated. Ruth Spencer offered that reserving is possible in both regular print and large print, doubling one’s opportunities. And who doesn’t love LARGE PRINT?

Your grandmother’s book club certainly didn’t include asparagus frittata, and Oregon strawberries and Toll House cookies (the Massachusetts establishment after which chocolate chip goodies were originally named).  Rae Coleman, hostess, did the culinary honors. Lots of clean plates.

Everyone needs a break from a diet of video games, and the VV book club provides it.

(Ellin Johnson)