Liz Jolley- speech therapist, remodeler, and memories of working on a holly farm

Liz Jolley grew up working on her family's holly farm- she shares her fun memories.

She followed in her dad's footsteps and became a speech therapist. She shares
the interesting steps she takes to help her students with speech and language.

She is also passionate about remodeling and has refinished floors, bathrooms and
much more!

Subscribe to the Women of the Northwest podcast for inspiring stories and adventures.
Find me on my website: jan-johnson.com

Chapters

• 0:04 Welcome Liz
• 2:16 Process of Speech Therapy
• 13:47 Meeting her husband
• 14:33 Playing piano
• 17:13 Remodeling
• 25:47 Growing up on a holly farm

Transcript

[00:04] Jan: Hey there, listeners. Welcome to Women of the Northwest. Ordinary women leading extraordinary lives. You know those women who everyone seems to know, the ones that balance a dozen at once and you can depend on them to not drop the ball, gals that are not afraid to have an idea and take the next step? Yeah, that's the kind of gals I'm talking about. These are the women I have conversations with each week, telling their stories and sharing their passions. Motivating, inspiring, compelling. Join us each week for a new episode found on Apple, Spotify, Google Play, itunes, iheart, and more.

[00:48] Jan: Well, hello, everybody. Welcome back to Women in the Northwest, and I have Liz Jolley with me. Hi, Liz.

[00:55] Liz: Hello.

[00:56] Jan: Glad you could join me. We've been working on trying to get together for quite a while. I know, but it's all good timing, right?

[01:05] Liz: Summer is crazy sometimes.

[01:07] Jan: Liz and I taught together at Hilda Lahti.

[01:10] Liz: For a number of years. Yeah, like when I was there the first time in 2000 ish and then again when I came back.

[01:19] Jan: Yeah, I think, okay, yeah, so we have known each other off and on a little bit, but I get to know even more because I get to interview her and you'll get to find out even more. Welcome. You've been doing speech for a long time?

[01:37] Liz: I have.

[01:39] Jan: It's kind of a chip after your dad's.

[01:44] Liz: When I was not super creative in choosing my career. So when I was little, I wanted to be a home act teacher, which was kind of after my mom because.

[01:54] Jan: They had home ec teachers.

[01:55] Liz: Exactly. I'm really glad. I would probably not have a job if I had gone that direction and then changed my mind and then decided to do speech therapy and after my dad followed in his footsteps.

[02:11] Jan: That's kind of neat. Tell me about the kids that you work with. What brings somebody to need speech services?

[02:17] Liz: So kids can have a variety of things that they need help in. I think when people hear about somebody getting speech therapy, they think initially they can't say their S or their Rs or their L's. They just think about the actual physical articulation or speech. And so I do do a lot of that, helping kids who maybe just have a couple of sounds that they can't say, or some kids who are just mostly unintelligible and are really, really struggling to get any message across.

[02:52] Jan: How do you actually do that? What kind of tricks do you use? What do you do?

[02:56] Liz: Well, I test them first and to get a really nice inventory of the sounds that they are not producing correctly and to look for patterns of errors. And then usually it kind of depends on the child, but usually I take the sound, the next sound developmentally that they should know because sounds are developed in an order mostly there are certain sounds that are appropriate for a three-year-old to be saying and certain that a four year old should be saying and certain that a five year old should be saying. So if they're five and they're not saying sounds that a three year old should be saying, then we probably start to work on those first. And I'm not going to start working on sounds that a child their age would not be expected to say yet. Right. Developmentally they're not going to have that ability to or they may not have that ability.

[03:57] Jan: What causes it to be developmental? Is it the formation of their mouth or is it what they hear? What causes that?

[04:07] Liz: Like what causes them to have the disorder to develop?

[04:11] Jan: But why would you have a certain sound of one age and not the others yet?

[04:15] Liz: So I think part of it is some of them are really visual and it's the amount of motor planning or the complexity of the movement. So like B and M are really early developing sounds and if you think about babies, they're babbling and those are also really visual ones that you can see the lips coming together for those and then it kind of moves a little bit back. So you've got T and dad and then sounds that are harder to make. The later developing sounds are like R and PH else around there. And so you think that an R, you can't see that.

[05:01] Jan: And does it make a difference between where the letter is in a word?

[05:07] Liz: It can. So sometimes I'll have a student who is saying a K, for example. They can say it at the end of the word, but they can't say at the beginning of the word or that sometimes happens for R also they'll be able to say it in one word position at the end of the word but not the beginning. And that usually means that they're in the process of developing that sound themselves.

[05:31] Jan: I see.

[05:32] Liz: They can say it, they can get their tongue or their mouth to make that movement and so it usually means that they're going to generalize it to the other positions of the word. So if they can say at the end, they're probably going to get it in the middle and probably at the beginning also. So I don't usually work on those sounds, I just kind of monitor that. But if I have a seven and a half year old and eight year old who can't say an R in any word position, they probably aren't going to get it on their own.

[06:04] Jan: So are you doing a lot of just modeling or how do you go about helping them understand that?

[06:10] Liz: So there are different techniques for different sounds, the ones that they can see that I do, I show them with my own mouth and show them how to make it.

[06:21] Jan: I don't have a mask on.

[06:23] Liz: It was so hard with Covet. Well, and thankfully I work in Napa like you mentioned. And they bought me these Plexiglass screens. So we just have Plexiglass screens up because you can't teach a first grader how to make an S sound if they can't see it, and if I can't see their mouth either, to give them to help them out. Exactly. So it was fantastic when we could not wear masks and just talk again. Yeah. So lots of modeling, some sounds. You can do that with F and B and P and B and then just lots of practice and doing that sound. Sometimes we'll get the mirror out and so they can see themselves because a lot of kids have motor planning difficulties and so they need to see it also. Right. And sometimes you'll just watch them and they're just studying your face, their eyes are on your lips and just waiting for you to help them out, to know what to do. But then with the R, for example, you can only open your mouth so much, and that's a really hard one to show. And so there are a bunch of different techniques that we use to help them to get that are sound, and we'll start with one that works, and if it doesn't, then we'll try another one.

[07:45] Jan: What about, like, with other languages where there's things that we aren't inherently knowing how to do certain sounds? I guess everybody has the capability of doing any sound.

[07:59] Liz: Yeah. So when I was in grad school, I actually worked in a lab with a professor who did a lot of speech perception studies. And so she was looking at how infants what they're attending to, because there's a time period where they can learn any sound and then that and then their ability to distinguish sounds as they get older is less so. And she would go to Japan and do a lot of looking at whether they can distinguish between R and L, for example. Yeah, interestingly. I was having a conversation recently with somebody from another country and talking about the pronunciation of Astoria because Astoria, Oregon, is with an A as opposed to Astoria, New York, which is with the and so I was talking about the difference between Astoria and Astoria, and they could not hear the difference. So say the two again. Astoria, Astoria. And they couldn't hear the difference, and they couldn't make the different really vowel sounds either. So there is a point in development when children are not able to hear that distinction between the two sounds and then they usually can't say it. Which is why I imagine children who are the earlier you're exposed to a language, the less of an accent you end up having because you can hear and make those differences.

[09:28] Jan: However, if you're learning a different language, you end up as a teenager or adult or whatever, you end up figuring out those sounds, too. Interesting.

[09:41] Liz: Yeah. And I do end up working with children who maybe speak Spanish as their first language or other languages, and then you have to be really aware of whether the difference in their sound is a result of their first language or a difficulty producing that sound. Because as a speech therapist, you're not going to address something that's not a disability. Right. You're not going to address a difference in speech therapy. So like with the people who speak Spanish, that the S and the T and the D are produced with your tongue farther forward. Right. So I'm not going to touch that. Right. But I could work on other things.

[10:29] Jan: Yeah. Do you see any kind of a pattern as to maybe a kid's background or something where there might be more speech problems because of something or I don't know.

[10:43] Liz: Well, there sure seems to be a lot of times parents will mention, oh, I had that same problem when I was a kid. Or sometimes I'll be working with I'll evaluate a child who has difficult S and has a frontal lisp, and then the parents will come in and they will too. Exactly. Their parents, maybe, yeah. So is it nature or nurture at that point? I don't know. Or a parent might have fixed all of their errors and the child is still having a hard time, so maybe there's that interesting. Yeah. And then sometimes kids just have a motor planning disorder and they just can't figure out how to get their mouth to move, how to make it work. Yeah.

[11:35] Jan: So, Liz, besides doing just the letter pronunciation things, what other things are there that are involved in speech?

[11:43] Liz: I do a lot of work with language, so vocabulary or sentence structure or being able to put words together into sentences, and the acquisition of vocabulary as kids get older. I also work with children with autism or different social language disorders on using language socially to interact with other people, which is a challenge.

[12:08] Jan: It's a general thing that everybody knows it's not.

[12:13] Liz: There are all sorts of unwritten social rules that a lot of kids pick up on just naturally, and other kids have to be taught discreetly. So we work on those things and kind of going through those rules.

[12:25] Jan: And maybe part of that, particularly maybe with some of the statistics that isn't doing eye contact is not noticing all of the cues that somebody else might yeah.

[12:37] Liz: They just aren't picking up on those. And so we teach them and then help them to generalize that into conversation. I also work on kids or work with kids who stutter, who have fluency disorders. A speech therapist also works with kids with voice and swallowing disorders. However, in the schools, I have never worked with somebody on swallowing, and I also don't think I've ever worked on somebody with voice disorder either. But those are also within our scope of practice. Yeah.

[13:09] Jan: It must be really rewarding to see the progress with kids.

[13:13] Liz: It's so rewarding. It's so much fun seeing them get excited when they can do something and they'll come in and listen to this. Where did you grow up in Astoria? Well on Fern Hill Road just in this area. And then I went away to school. Where did you go to school? I went to Brigham Young University for my undergrad in Utah and then University of Washington for my masters in Seattle. And yeah, loved both of them. They couldn't have been more different, but I loved them both.

[13:47] Jan: They had their own special things. Where did you meet your husband?

[13:51] Liz: We met in Auburn, Washington. So I was living up there and working and he also was in Auburn and we were going to the same church and.

[14:07] Jan: I had this moment well.

[14:09] Liz: Actually a friend had invited me I've friend had invited me to a party and I had been putting off she's invited me to lots of parties and I was like. I had the excuse each time and finally I thought. This is rude. I can't say no one more time. So I said, sure, and he was there and then there you go.

[14:33] Jan: Yeah, that's pretty cool. Pretty cool. And you are an amazing *****. I've heard you when you didn't know I was walking by playing in the classroom back when you had a piano in the room there. Oh my gosh, yes. How did you get interested in piano?

[14:49] Liz: Well, I started lessons when I was four.

[14:51] Jan: Oh, really?

[14:53] Liz: Yeah, thankfully my parents started me playing.

[14:57] Jan: Did they play too or not?

[14:59] Liz: My mom played a bit, not a lot. My dad plays the guitar. So they had me start taking lessons when I was four and thankfully helped me continue to take lessons because there.

[15:14] Jan: Comes a little point when you do a lesson, it's kind of like yeah.

[15:19] Liz: And it's a serious commitment on the part of parents to take you to a lesson each week and it costs money.

[15:28] Jan: They must have seen that you were talented in that area.

[15:32] Liz: Just help me stick with it. And I'm grateful because now it gives me so much joy and I can play for different for people singing or for choirs or for groups.

[15:46] Jan: I started playing flute when I was in fourth grade and I just loved it. I still play, I just played all through college and whatever. It's nice to be able to pick up and be a part of something.

[15:58] Liz: It is, yeah, it really is. And then when I was in high school, I started playing cello. Well, in middle school I started playing cello also and loved being a part of an orchestra that group making music, it's a theme, it is so much fun. And then in high school I also played bass guitar in stage band, which was so much fun. Yeah. And then when I was in college, took a bunch of organ classes also. Yeah, that was so much fun too.

[16:30] Jan: I've been toying with should I start being a part of the local orchestra or something. I know, I'd love it, but it's just making a commitment to do.

[16:41] Liz: Me too. And I have friends who are in the local orchestras and I would love to, but it's that commitment every Saturday.

[16:48] Jan: Yeah, but I think I don't know, I talk to Corey and I guess you can do just a season. You don't have to commit for the whole year.

[16:57] Liz: I have a feeling that once we start, you'd be hooked better.

[17:01] Jan: Yeah, I know. I just miss being with that whole community. I did marching band too. Oh, wow.

[17:09] Liz: Yeah.

[17:09] Jan: But it was just fun.

[17:10] Liz: Yeah. It's like there's a certain magic making music with a group.

[17:13] Jan: There is, yeah. It's really cool. So you are also like me, like to do some remodeling. You've been working on your house. Tell me what you've done on your house.

[17:25] Liz: We have refinished every floor in the house.

[17:30] Jan: Oh, my. Ripping up where the hardwood floors or.

[17:34] Liz: They were refinishing the hardwood floors, which.

[17:37] Jan: Is a messy job.

[17:38] Liz: It's so messy. And when you do kind of a few rooms at a time and then you just have that mess over and over.

[17:48] Jan: When I did the downstairs and I taped everything, plastic doesn't matter.

[17:53] Liz: It's a little less yeah.

[18:00] Jan: Anyway, you think you've cleaned it all up and then it's still like, oh, yeah, the cobwebs come out and go yeah, exactly.

[18:09] Liz: I have learned things over the years about doing that, though, so it is easier than the very first time I did one. That's nice. So I've refinished or replaced all the floors and then lots of painting. We've remodeled two of the bathrooms.

[18:26] Jan: Those are huge jobs.

[18:28] Liz: They are huge jobs, yeah.

[18:30] Jan: And it just starts with, oh, I'm just going to take down this one.

[18:34] Liz: Little thing, because it's like upstairs bathroom. It was exactly that. Our house was built in 1923 and it was my grandma's beforehand. So the upstairs bathroom, it had this metallic silver wallpaper.

[18:51] Jan: You didn't like that?

[18:52] Liz: Well, it was hip in the 70s when she put it in. I remember when it went in and I loved it, but no. They're Laugh and plaster Walls and so it was starting to come off and you can see bubbles in the wallpaper, so I thought, I am just going to take off the wallpaper and then I can paint these walls of cake. Yeah, exactly. So I took off the wallpaper and it came off really nicely, but so did almost all of the plaster with it down just to the laugh. And I'm doing this just to make do for the time being, right. And then send them down to the lath. And we had wanted to change the layout footprint.

[19:35] Jan: When you got down to the lap, was it any rotten wood or was it just thankfully?

[19:41] Liz: No. Yeah, thankfully, there's no rot in it. But our intent was to change the footprint eventually, so then when it was down to the last I didn't want to resheet rocket or fix that if I was going to change the layout. So it looked really bad for a long time until we got around to taking care of that.

[20:03] Jan: Did you end up taking out a bathtub and the whole works, or the.

[20:07] Liz: Bathtub was on one wall, but it's under a sloping ceiling, so you couldn't have a shower there. So we had to turn the bathtub the other direction so that you could have a shower there also. And yes, we just had to just reconfigure rotate.

[20:21] Jan: You had to do a little plumbing.

[20:25] Liz: It was down to the studs, but it's fun.

[20:28] Jan: How about your kitchen?

[20:30] Liz: We have not done anything structural in there. Just like refinishing cabinets and putting in a new floor and yeah, and painting.

[20:41] Jan: Yeah, lots of painting. What's your favorite kind of paint?

[20:47] Liz: Like brand?

[20:48] Jan: I love Benjamin more know I'm sold. I'm Benjamin Warren. Yeah, totally sold.

[20:57] Liz: My first house, a friend had a gallon of something else, and she's like, here, you can use this. And I thought paint's expensive. Sure. And they go I was like, yeah, exactly. Well, that took ten coats, porch painted.

[21:12] Jan: In, and it cost me more than I would expect. Oh, my gosh. Yes, I know. So what's next on the bucket list?

[21:22] Liz: The front porch. And the front porch is our last major project.

[21:27] Jan: You have to do it. Probably rip it all out. Is it all rotten that you have to rip out?

[21:31] Liz: No, it's not rotten. So my grandparents the house was built 1923. My grandparents bought it in the original front porch was just really beautiful, but it also had two really tall hues on either side of it. And I think that they were rotting because it has cedar gutters. So I think that they're rotting the gutters. I think that there was rot in it. And my grandpa and also, it was like 1950 at this point. And I think that they're trying to modernize it because who wants something for the 20? So I think they're trying to modernize it. And so he took off the old front porch and then replaced it with a brick and glass block. But I just love the original front porch. So we're going to take out the new front porch and restore it to how it originally was. And that is something that is above our pay grade.

[22:34] Jan: And you need to know which parts are above the pay grade and which are not. Let me tell you. And plus, I don't know now it's kind of like, oh, my backwards. I don't want to get down my knees. Maybe I don't want to do this anymore. I don't know.

[22:55] Liz: I had learned a really important lesson when I was working on my first house. I had wanted to move the stove from where it was to a different location. So I thought, that's easy. That's right. Exactly. So the basement was unfinished, so it was easy to move the electrical over there and bring it up through the floor. And my dad had walked me through this is just so foolhardy. But my dad had walked me through how this would work, how I'd wire this in. So I wired the outlet. Wait.

[23:25] Jan: This is pre YouTube.

[23:27] Liz: Oh, yes.

[23:30] Jan: Well, did you actually get a book and look at how to do it?

[23:33] Liz: Or was it no, he told us.

[23:35] Jan: Your dad told me.

[23:37] Liz: He told me where to put each of the hots and then the neutral. So I wired it up and I thought, okay, this looks right. This looks great. So then I got up my little electrical tester and I put it in one of the hot and then one in the neutral and the light comes on. Okay, that one's working. And then the other side the hot and then the neutral, the light comes on, so that's great. And then hot to hot because I had no idea. I didn't understand 110 versus 220. So then hot to hot and it was like this bang. And it fried my electrical tester and it charged the floor in front of it. And it also caught the wires that were coming into the house on fire so that I had a fire out in the east. So I gained a healthy respect for electricity and that I really understood what 220 meant versus a 110 outlet. Lucky I didn't like, really hurt myself.

[24:44] Jan: When I married it. And he had this ancient pink and yellow gas stove, whatever, and you had to light it with a match. Oh, dear, the oven.

[24:54] Liz: You have the light too.

[24:56] Jan: And so it wasn't an automatic kind of something. And I'm not used to gas at all anyway, whatever. But I lit it and it exploded. I mean, I cinched my eyebrow, dear. The windows are rattling or whatever. Like okay, maybe I'm done with that.

[25:15] Liz: We're not cooking anything today.

[25:17] Jan: And no little kids here around.

[25:21] Liz: I know. That learning curve is pretty steep.

[25:23] Jan: Maybe we should go back to the woods, though. The wood picks over that point.

[25:26] Liz: That's right. So I recognize that this front porch is outside of my range of expertise. So we're having somebody come and help us. Good. I'll do the parts that I can.

[25:38] Jan: It will be lovely. And then you'll be have an open house.

[25:42] Liz: We're going to have a party for a happy birthday party for our house.

[25:47] Jan: Exactly. Tell me about the holly farm. Your family had a holly farm, right?

[25:52] Liz: Yes. So my grandpa started well, my grandparents started in the 50s. My house had a holly orchard on it. And Holly was big in the so they decided to start harvesting it and she was orchard. It was I don't know how big their original orchard was. I don't know. It was in the section that was between my grandparents house and my parents house that I grew up in that was acres. So they planned had more holly trees at that point, and then they started harvesting.

[26:40] Jan: You don't really have to plant them, though. Don't they just kind of keep isn't it so interesting?

[26:45] Liz: So, like, they sprout up everywhere, but that's not the holly that you're producing that you're harvesting. I think it's a different kind of holly that just brought up because these are trees as opposed to the kind of little bushy stuff, and you have to specifically propagate that variety.

[27:08] Jan: Okay.

[27:09] Liz: Yeah. So they started harvesting it. It was originally just boxed holly, and then the business kind of grew and grew, and then my grandpa passed away in 1972. So then my grandma took over the business.

[27:23] Jan: Okay.

[27:24] Liz: And then my mom and some of her siblings came down and helped kind of throughout the years as she was working on running that by herself.

[27:34] Jan: So that was a seasonal job.

[27:35] Liz: Yes, exactly.

[27:37] Jan: Some people work there all year long too, or was it just?

[27:40] Liz: I'm not 100% sure. There were different people throughout the years who did different things, and so I don't know how many they had the whole year round at that point. I don't think that they had any. But I could be wrong.

[27:56] Jan: I mean, I have to prune them too.

[27:58] Liz: Yeah, but like, my grandpa did that he knew about propagating and grafting and pruning, so he took care of that well, and then his children put them to work.

[28:08] Jan: When you were working, what was your job? What did you do?

[28:11] Liz: Well, I've done lots of jobs.

[28:14] Jan: I go for everything.

[28:15] Liz: Yeah. My mom and my Uncle Conrad bought the farm from my grandma in 1979, and so then they ran it from that point on. And so as kids, we had all sorts of different jobs. So we would wire pine cones. So you have to take a pine cone and put a wire around it so it can be put into a wreath. So we wired lots and lots of pine cones for the garlands. They used to measure out the 75 foot length of wire so then the garland maker would know how long to make the garland because they're all made by hand. So we would measure out 75 foot lengths of wire and then wrap them on cardboard. And that was a repetitive job.

[29:01] Jan: So this holly, though, it's not prickly like the other one?

[29:04] Liz: Oh, it is. So in 79, when my mom and my uncle bought the business and they introduced other evergreens, so then they started doing, like, fur Reeves and garlands and centerpieces.

[29:15] Jan: I see.

[29:16] Liz: So they used other greens plus the holly.

[29:20] Jan: Okay.

[29:20] Liz: So they still did strictly the holly reese and the box holly, but they also did other Christmas evergreens. The garlands are mostly cedar. Cedar and Douglas. So we did that. We picked up pine cones a lot. That was a major summer job, was to go pick up semi truckloads of pine cones.

[29:41] Jan: But around here, no, like Bend coast.

[29:46] Liz: Yeah, exactly. Bend or Central Washington. So tons and tons of years of picking pinecones. Lots of stories and lots of memories. Hiding behind hiding behind stumps and hoping that no one will see that you're not doing anything. Most of the stories have been revealed. We would do that with my cousin. It was fantastic. I loved it.

[30:20] Jan: I learned all kinds of things I.

[30:22] Liz: Did and it was me and my siblings and then my cousins, my Uncle Conrad's children, and we are just the best of friends. And a lot of that is we talk about those experiences picking pine cones so often and there were certain rules, there were things you did and you didn't do. Like you were in a group with somebody else and you each had an area and you had to work towards your goal and you would work for a certain period of time and then take a break and then finish up the rest of your quota for the day. Exactly. Like you had to be really disciplined. You couldn't just **** around and then hope to get done. But as soon as you were done, then you went and found the next person who needed help. So it wasn't like your job was done for the day. You went and helped somebody else.

[31:07] Jan: Wow, what a great way to grow up. Good ethics.

[31:11] Liz: Yeah. And some of the other rules. If you found a really good spot, then you're really tempted to just keep it all to yourself because you had your quota. But we're like, save it for the next day, don't tell anyone, but we didn't do that. Right. You would invite other people and, hey, I found this great tree over here, come and take over here. So just great teamwork. And then we all hauled off the bags and we would get up and work really early before it was too hot and then we would be done. Noonish or one ish. You're just hot and sweaty and dusty. So then we go into the local Burger King for lunch. Looked like something the cat dragged.

[31:59] Jan: It's a unique experience.

[32:04] Liz: It really was. Yes. And you're trying to go so fast. I had a friend who suggested that you could use those grippers to pick things up. I'm so sorry, it's way too slow.

[32:21] Jan: So now your family is sold out though?

[32:23] Liz: Yes. A couple of years ago they decided that my mom and uncle were retired. Yeah, it's time to retire. And the new owners are fantastic. It's always worried when something that has been in the family for so long and there's a certain nostalgia and romance to this business that's been part of your life for so long. And so you worry that somebody else is going to come in and what's going to happen to it. But the new owners are fantastic. We couldn't have hoped. For a better yeah, that's awesome. It really is fantastic. They're just really nice and they're working hard at keeping it and going.

[33:08] Jan: Well, we're out of time. We can just keep talking and talking about all kinds of things. This is fun.

[33:14] Liz: This is so much fun.

[33:15] Jan: Thank you so much.

[33:17] Liz: Thank you for having me. It was fun to visit.

[33:19] Jan: Well, that was pretty fun. Who knew you could go from speech therapy to piano to remodeling and working on a family? Holly farm so many things. But that's what makes our women so accepted. Cause they don't just sit around, they just find all kinds of things to enrich their lives with. I hope you guys have a great week and we'll see you again next time.