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Edie Hector, 92, hugs Dr. Fred Kiehl on Tuesday afternoon at Northwest Family Health. Edie has been a volunteer office worker at the Maysville clinic since 1991. Having no surviving family, she says the staff at the clinic is her family now. ‘I really don’t know what I would do without this place,’ she says.

Edie Hector traces her curiosity to the womb. Can’t help having an active mind, even prenatally.

She tells the story of her mother in labor, her father in a panic and Green Lake standing between them and help. They set off in a rowboat, and Edie came into the world afloat.

“I didn’t wait,” she says. “I got bored before we got there.”

The 92 years that followed gave rise to an even greater restiveness.

Her school bus took her over mountains in the neighborhood of Yosemite. She built bombers for the British and explored ice caves.

When she married the first time, Edie ran off to Nevada to wed a guy whose transfusion saved her after a motorcycle accident.

“I thought, I guess I should if he gave me his blood,” she remembers.

Memories come to her at her desk in a back corner of the Northwest Family Health office in Maysville, Mo. She started here in 1991, four years after the death of Fred, her husband of more than four decades. Her volunteer job includes making patient charts, getting and directing mail, handling invoices and bills.

On a Friday afternoon, she sits with neat stacks before her. Monday’s work, already done.

“If you start something, stick with it until you get it finished,” she says. “When I leave here at night, nobody has to wonder what I was working on.”

Related to no one within these walls, or any walls as Edie tells it, she calls this her family.

“She’s just the greatest,” says Marsha Smith, a co-worker of many years. “We almost have to make her go home.”

Life begun in a boat in 1916, she spent her early years, the middle of three children, in the Puget Sound area. Her father, injured in a manufacturing accident, moved the family to Mariposa County in California.

Unlike their time in Seattle, family members adjusted to life in a two-room cabin on the Merced River, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. A bus bore the children over Sierra Nevada foothills to school, Edie helping others with her algebra skills during the long, winding rides.

When she got into high school, Edie worked summers at nearby Yosemite National Park, doing laundry for the swank Ahwahnee Hotel. It never dawned on her, she recalls, to feel poor.

Her father warned her about marrying the guy with the compatible blood type. She did anyway, sneaking across the state line with him before anyone knew.

“It went along pretty good for a while,” she says, “but then it didn’t work out so good.”

When World War II broke out, she went to Los Angeles, where Lockheed had opportunities for women in their aircraft plant. A job screener asked if she had ever repaired anything electrical. She said that once she replaced a plug on an extension cord.

“You’re hired,” the person told her.

She installed de-icer motors on a bomber assembly, then worked on P-38s. She married again, a soldier who didn’t come home from the war.

When Lockheed production slowed, Edie got a job with a roofing and siding company. The first time she saw Bill Hector, bandages covered his head and arms, the result of a hot tar mishap.

With siding work, Bill would travel the Western states, his new wife alongside. They would spend the summer in Portland, back in Southern California for the winter. Then summers in Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, even Chicago.

Their cross-country drives found them in caves and petrified forests and among other off-the-map distractions. “I’ve always been ... I won’t say pushy, but I have a curious mind,” she says.

Edie first went to Maysville in 1951, visiting Bill’s father. She and Bill moved there for good in the 1960s, and she now lives in that same Hector house just down from her workplace.

In the early 1990s, doctors told Edie to limit her yard work, an onerous request in her eyes. As an alternative, she began to volunteer at the office. “This way, they could keep their eye on me,” she explains.

Dr. Fred Kiehl, citing some research on the therapeutic value of hugs, assigned her this ancillary duty. Few visitors to the health facility escape without an embrace from the petite woman. Current concerns now curtail this.

“I’m not to hug the patients until after the flu season’s over,” she says.

“Moratorium so we don’t get mortality,” Dr. Kiehl counters.

After she became a Christian in 1989, Edie started as a regular volunteer at Camp Quality and Camp Courage, doing crafts, leading hikes and going fishing with cancer patients and the developmentally disabled. The T-shirt she wears at those camps reflects her continuing appetite for life.

It reads: “Recycled Teenager.”

Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.