My earliest memory of Pat Deckard involves eating French toast in her kitchen. I was seven, maybe eight years old at the time, and it must have been the morning after a sleepover. The Deckards had a back garage separate from their house where anywhere from three to eight boys from the neighborhood would have slumber parties. We slept on old mattresses with metal coils exposed, too dirty for dogs to lie on, and huddled around space heaters to keep us from freezing to death when the temperature dropped. The following morning, cold and hungry, we would go inside the house to warm up and eat breakfast. The funny thing is, the Deckard’s back garage sat directly between their house and ours, so it would have been just as easy for me to walk home and eat breakfast there. But Pat Deckard’s specialties were French toast with too much powdered sugar and cinnamon toast with too much cinnamon sugar, so we ate breakfast there instead.

My parents bought their house in Sun Valley in 1978, which is when we became the Deckards’ next door neighbors. There was Pat and her husband Johnny, and three boys: Jeff, Greg, and Doug. Doug, the youngest of the clan, was a year older than I was. (I was four years old; he was five.) Between the three Deckard boys next door and the four Roarks boys across the street, there was always a game of football or baseball or backyard golf going on.

Pat Deckard worked as a realtor in Yukon for fifty years. When you’re a realtor in a small town for half a century, I can’t imagine there aren’t too many people you haven’t run into. There was a time when you couldn’t drive through a neighborhood in Yukon without seeing Pat Deckard’s name attached to a metal “FOR SALE” realtor sign sticking in someone’s front yard. Most of Yukon has seen Pat’s name on a sign or her face in a newspaper ad. If you dropped Pat’s name in conversation to a local stranger, there’s a pretty good chance they either knew her or one of her boys, had bought a house from her, or had received a pumpkin from her.

Yeah, about those pumpkins. Pat used to hand paint faces on pumpkins and deliver them to her former clients around Halloween. We’re talking hundreds and hundreds of pumpkins here. Each October for many years, Susan and I would wake up to find a pumpkin (sometimes two) sitting outside on our porch or our mailbox. I believe in later years Pat’s grandkids helped paint the pumpkins. I never once caught her delivering our pumpkin. Each year we would just wake up one fall day, find a pumpkin outside our house, and know Pat had been there.

Sun Valley ended up with more of those pumpkins than any other neighborhood. Pat Deckard was the matriarch of Sun Valley. For as long as I can remember, Pat organized Sun Valley’s annual Neighborhood Garage Sale. Years (decades?) before neighborhood garage sales were common, Sun Valley hosted its own. Pat took care of the advertising and the permit. One weekend every April, the residents of Sun Valley would host garage sales and people would flock to the neighborhood like you wouldn’t believe. Garage Sale Day hasn’t been as popular lately due to competing neighborhood sales, but as anyone who lived in Sun Valley in the 1980s can attest, there were years were getting in or out of the neighborhood — or simply driving down the street — was nearly impossible. All day long, both sides of every street were lined with parked cars, with just enough room for a third to squeeze through the middle.

Garage Sale Day wasn’t just about all the fun things you bought. It was about seeing the people in the neighborhood. In the early years, it was about running into your neighbors, whether they were out shopping or hosting their own sale. In later years, it’s become more about running into people who used to live in Sun Valley. And sooner or later on Garage Sale Day, we would always run into Pat Deckard. Sometimes she would just be checking in on people to see how things were going and sometimes she would be out shopping, but she was always out and about. And the best thing was, somehow Pat knew what everybody was selling and what everybody wanted to buy, so if you ran across her, she would point you to something you wanted.

“Robbie,” she once said to me, “I know you guys are looking for a couch. There is one for sale three blocks over, and it is awesome.” For the record, “awesome” was Pat Deckard’s favorite word. I’m not sure I had a single conversation with her where she didn’t utter it at least once.

As I got older I found out knowing Pat Deckard as an adult was even better than knowing her as a kid. She and I were both thrifters, and more than once she called me with a tip. She once called me to let me know about an upcoming estate sale that was selling a couple of arcade games. “I was over there today and saw the machines,” she told me over the phone, “and they are awesome.” (I went to the sale, and bought both machines.) One time, Pat asked me to stop by her house and take a look at her computer. Before I could leave, she had dragged me out to the back garage to show me some Star Wars cups and glasses she had won at an auction, which she ended up giving to me.

I have a million stories about Pat Deckard, but I’ll leave you with this one. My son Mason was born in December of 2001, just two months after Pat’s husband, Johnny, passed away. On Mason’s first Halloween, we dressed him up in something and drove around to show him off to friends and family. The next year, Mason was walking and a bit more into Halloween. That year he wore a Tigger costume, and again we drove him around to half a dozen people’s houses to show him off and let him trick-or-treat. One of the last houses we stopped at that night was Pat Deckard’s. Pat invited us inside, and the four of us sat around talking. Pat showed Susan her coffin — she had a coffin that was lined with cowhide, fur and leather that sat in her living room and doubled as a coffee table for a while. I think that was the night Susan and Pat bonded. Susan used to call Pat Deckard a “spice of life,” one of those people who just made life more interesting. Before we left that night, Pat told us it had been a slow night for trick-or-treaters and proceeded to dump her gigantic bowl of Reese’s peanut butter cups into Mason’s bag. I think Mason bonded with Pat Deckard that night, too.

“Mason, I love your Tigger costume,” said Pat. “That is awesome.”

Pat Deckard was a spice of life.

Pat Deckard was awesome.