Nora Polizzi is a partner in Sequim’s A Dropped Stitch. In between providing a steady stream of customers with knitting advice, she told us this story of the home she and her husband, Lew, purchased after they retired from jobs in Reno, Nev. It’s deep in the wilderness near Haines, Alaska, on Chilkat Lake.

The silence “drove me crazy,” she said. But there were good times, too, like progressive dinner parties that would begin at one neighbor’s house at 4 p.m. and end well down the way at 3 a.m. “You just got on your snow machine and went,” she said.

❝Our house is about a mile up a river. The first part is just for jet boats, then there’s a nice little river, then the lake. That’s the only way to get in there in the summer. It’s better in the winter when you can take snow machines — but we bought it in the summer.

We were going to remodel the house — were going to remodel the kitchen. We had to go to White Horse to get the cabinets.

The cabinets were delivered — it took several boatloads. We put everything on the landing dock and left it there.

We were doing all the work ourselves. We were taking out the old ones. There was no place else to put all the stuff.

The second day we looked out the window and there was a little black bear playing with the boxes. They’re like kittens — he was batting them around.

We tried to scare him off but he kept coming back. He wasn’t leaving.

So we had him for dinner.

That was at my insistence. I wanted my cabinets dry. I didn’t want to fish them out of the bottom of the lake.

It was pretty tasty.❞

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 Mark Couhig at mcouhig@sequimgazette.com.