A Wine Collection With a Story in Every Bottle

With prompting, and my daily smell exercises, I started to understand Liddy's lessons with blackberries, cherries, plums and earth smells.

To this day, my mother curses Liddy, accusing her of creating a "super nose" on me.

"You ought to work for the government with that nose," she said once after I remarked there was something smelly in her kitchen. "I don't smell anything."

I was working in Seattle when I got the call from Liddy that Jerry had died. It was 1993. I didn't even know he was sick, but apparently he caught a rare strain of pneumonia and was gone in less than three days.

Liddy always believed that Jerry had respiratory problems stemming from Agent Orange during his stint in Vietnam. She also believed the chemicals he used as a soldier likely prevented them from having children.

The only time I saw battle scars from Vietnam was when Jerry occasionally drank too much wine. He would sit on the porch as the summer sun dipped below the hills, extinguishing all light before the moon and stars could sparkle, and talk to himself.

Whenever this happened, Liddy would tell me to go to my bedroom and read while she sat next to him. My bedroom was above the porch, so I heard some of the conversations. On those occasions, I learned that Jerry's soul was damaged and Liddy was the saint sent to comfort him.

One time I looked out the window and saw the couple shedding their clothes to skinny dip in their man-made pond. It looked like four big, white, bouncing moons hitting the water. While the memory makes me smile now, I remember being horrified at that sight when I was 12.

Liddy created a nurturing environment for Jerry to heal. Without him, she didn't want to stay on the farm and it was sold in less than six months after his death.

Liddy moved to Portland and funneled her energy helping people get jobs. Eventually, she bought into a company and ran her own business.

I lost track of her for a few years. We sent birthday and Christmas cards, and talked on the phone every four months or so, but she never revealed how much she suffered the first years after Jerry died. It wasn't until recently that she confided in me about her life for the first three years after her husband's death. She said she drank too much in order to ease her

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