STANWOOD — Dorothy Dillon remembers the sunny springs from her childhood, when the hills around Prosser turned vibrant green with new grass.
The youngest of three siblings, she spent her early years on a small ranch there. Her father grew crops, though she can’t recall all of them. They had horses and cows. There were cherry trees where, years later, Dillon’s daughter would sit and eat the sweet fruits, spitting out the pits.
The 15-acre plot wasn’t a lot of land to make a living off of, but Dillon’s family was busy, and they were happy.
She stayed busy all of her life. She credits her constant activity for keeping her young as the years passed. On Wednesday, she celebrated her 107th birthday.
A caretaker at Brookdale Senior Living in Stanwood, where Dillon lives with her only daughter, reminded her about her birthday. Dillon struggles to hear, so people communicate with her by writing questions or comments in big letters on a hand-held whiteboard.
“My 107th?” Dillon asked, her soft face crinkling as she stared at her age written in bold black numbers. “Great Scott!”
Dillon was born a year after Ford unveiled the Model T and four and a half years before the start of World War I. She was a teenager during the Roaring 20s.
She didn’t need a lot of hoopla for her 107th birthday, she said, but the people who help care for her at the center planned a celebration. About 30 folks gathered around tables for cake, complete with 107 candles. A band played upbeat music and pink balloons floated above a vase of pink roses. Dillon loves gardening, and pink roses are her favorite flower. She wore a sparkly tiara in her short white hair and a cluster of roses pinned to her jacket.
“I like anything that grows and isn’t injurious, like things with too many pricklies on them and so forth,” she said. “It’s just interesting to plant things and watch them grow.”
She learned to garden as a child on her family’s ranch. She went to every event she could in Prosser. The town had maybe 2,000 people, and they liked to work and play hard, she said.
There were crops to tend during the day and dances to attend in the evenings. It was frigid in winter and hot in the summer. Spring was beautiful, and people thrived.
“They were always off gallivanting around,” Dillon said. “If you wanted to get them at home, you had to get up early.”
After leaving the Yakima Valley, Dillon worked as a nurse off and on for about 30 years. She started at Deaconess Hospital in Spokane and later filled in at doctors’ offices for nurses on leave. She met her late husband, Harold, while training to be a nurse. They were married for more than 60 years.
The couple had one child, Mary Elmslie. She’s 84 now and lives with her mother at Brookdale.
“She taught me humility, but we always had a good time,” Elmslie said. “We used to go camping and down to the ocean.”
They traveled once to Washington, D.C., by train, a big trip for Elmslie and her mom, who spent most of her life in Washington state. Dillon also volunteered to lead a troop of Bluebird Camp Fire Girls, which was a lot of fun, her daughter said.
Since Elmslie was a teen, she and her mom have fit in the same clothes. She once wore her mom’s high heels to school, “but boy was I glad to get them off when I got home,” she said.
They never fought about the clothes or shoes. The one disagreement they often ran into revolved around the telephone. Dillon thought her daughter stayed on the phone much too long.
Dillon has one grandson and six great-grandchildren. They live in Arlington. The family spent Christmas together, and they visit Dillon and Elmslie at least every other week.
The 107-year-old wields a dry wit and finds humor in just about everything. She’s clever and sweet, Elmslie said.
“She rarely has a bad word to say about anybody,” she said. “I don’t think she has an enemy in the world.”
Dillon loves animals. That started with the cows and horses her father raised. Later on, Elmslie would bring home stray cats and they always were welcome.
“One time she found a hummingbird in the bush that was next door, and the poor thing was soaking wet,” Elmslie said. “She brought him in and fed him with an eye dropper, and I’ll be darned if that hummingbird didn’t heal right up. After we let it free, it would come back for a while and she’d hold up the eye dropper and it would eat.”
Dillon has three pieces of advice to help people live a long, happy life: make yourself busy, stay physically and mentally active, and keep your nose out of other people’s business.
At 107, Dillon is one of the oldest people in the world. The oldest women on record have lived to 117. Worldwide, an estimated 450,000 people are older than 100, out of a total population of 7.5 billion people. As of September, the U.S. Census estimated there were about 55,000 people older than 100 in the United States.
Kari Bray: 425-339-3439; kbray@heraldnet.com.
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