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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Flood Washes Away Widow’s Memories Memorial Garden For Husband Lost Along With House, Furnishings

Joe Kolman The Billings Gazette

Last month, Amy Simpson finished planting a rose garden where she planned to say her final goodbye to her husband Lewis by burying his ashes there - one year after his death.

The memorial garden was part of a magnificent yard filled with trees and flowers the couple created over the 20 years they lived in their Ninth Street Island home.

Now, one month after the worst flood in the history of the area, the yard is gone. The front of the house is gone. And the rose stems, hastily uprooted as the Yellowstone River threatened to whisk them away, stand in white plastic buckets outside the small, one bedroom apartment where Simpson now lives.

“I was going to enter the ‘Most Beautiful Garden’ contest at the fair,” says Simpson, 65. She pulls pictures out of her purse that show the 60 feet of yard she used to have between the bay windows and decks of her home and the river.

“We had many an evening there having cocktails and talking about playing croquet in the backyard,” says Jackie Degal, one of Simpson’s friends. “Nobody would have dreamed the water would have taken all that lawn.”

The mallets remain mute. “Water polo is more like it,” Simpson says.

The thought of the garden makes Simpson pause.

Her apartment, just a few blocks from the remains of her house, is sparse, especially for a woman who has saved every Christmas card for 33 years along with rooms full of mementos.

“Our heart and soul was in that place,” Simpson says. “I guess everything’s done for a purpose. I don’t know what the purpose of this is.”

Homes on either side of Simpson’s were left virtually untouched.

It has been more than a month since the last time Simpson slept in her home. The island was ordered evacuated on June 9. Friends say she has struggled with the reality that her home is destroyed.

On the day when the front portion succumbed to the river, in a sense, so did Simpson.

“She just collapsed,” says Degal, who took her to the hospital.

“I told the kids, if the house goes, I want to go in the river with it,” Simpson says.

Friday, standing in what used to be her living room while water ran underneath the floor, Simpson said her legs were shaky and her soft voice wavered. The Yellowstone shimmered in the late-morning sun outside the gaping hole in the home. The deck sagged into the water.

Bricks from what used to be a hearth are all that remain of the cove where a wood stove once sat. It too gave in to the river.

“That’s probably one of my trees over there,” she said, pointing to the opposite bank.

“I’m glad my husband can’t see it,” Simpson said. “It would break his heart. There wasn’t a nail in any of the stuff he did, it was all screws. He was so proud of it.”

Amy Simpson came to America from Liverpool, England in 1960. She met Lewis on a blind date. One month later they were engaged. Another seven weeks and they were married. And “nine months and 20 minutes after the lights went out,” the first of their two daughters was born.

They moved to Livingston when he was hired as the superintendent of schools, a position he held for seven years. He worked in Alaska from 1984 to 1987, but they continued to summer at their Ninth Street Island home.

A few years ago, he was operated on for colon cancer. Then he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died on June 5, 1995.

In the days since the flood, Simpson says members of the community have turned out in force to help. On the night it was decided the river was going to win the battle, nearly 30 people showed up to haul her belongings away on flatbed trucks and in horse trailers. Friends helped her find the apartment .

Peter Walther, another friend, said a community fund-raiser is in the works and a relief fund for Simpson has been set up at the Livingston Federal Credit Union.

Still to be determined is whether any of the house can be saved, if the bank can be rebuilt or if another home can be built farther back on the property, out of the reach of the river.