A leader…and a poet

The late Crystal Dingler wasn’t just the mayor of Ocean Shores for nearly a decade, and a leader of the Friends of the Library before that. According to the city website, she was also a published poet, she earned a master’s degree in English at the University of Washington (before getting a law degree). Her poem Nesting is a childhood memory from her family farm; but it also calls to mind some of the natural wonders of Ocean Shores, where she lived from 2004 until her sudden passing Nov. 6:

It’s not as though we understood anything then, the fields tall with wheat-like grass, the orchard frozen one lone winter and the blackberry brambles rampant through the dead branches of apple and cherry.

We lined each nest with the lavender fluff of thistle and gathered our eggs from the hen house. We would hatch them ourselves, raise batch after batch until we were rich. We laughed those purple seedy laughs trading secrets like fluffy yellow chicks.

How the eggs rested against our legs like warm brown flesh, how we kept lifting our skirts to see if anything had hatched.

Crystal is survived by her husband Dean and their three children, Elizabeth, Kurt and Ken and her cat Pitty.