Clay artist and former nurse practitioner Jane Schupay was never one to stay put until she found herself at HRB at the Oliver.
You would be forgiven if you could not count the many moves of Jane Schupay—from a childhood in Florida to raising three children and becoming a nurse practitioner in Philadelphia, from leaving behind a divorce and starting over in California to the last decades spent shuttling between San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Seattle, Poulsbo, and Bainbridge Island, until finally settling at HRB at the Oliver earlier this year. Even Jane, 82, struggles to keep count.
Four times a week, she swims 90 lengths of the pool at the aquatic center, and with each of the first 82 lengths, she reviews a year of her life, tracking her workout progress while taking stock of her life. She’s now writing it all down as a kind of timeline. “We’ll see where it goes. I don’t know. But I will say that I have retrieved so many memories, not that I forgot, but that I just don’t think about, and come to appreciate how they’ve impacted my life.”
With each move came experimentation and discovery, reconnection with friends and family, and through it all self-reliance, hard work, and the insistence on a fully realized life in spite of modest means. “I was always able to get a dime out of every nickel,” she says.
Jane began her nursing career in 1963 and worked full time ever since her youngest was 9 months old, earning a master’s degree as a nurse practitioner, before there was even a job title for this level of expertise, and teaching at Villanova University and Jefferson University, all the while supporting her family through her husband’s sporadic employment. In 1990, she divorced and found herself deep in debt through no fault of her own. She sold her furniture and moved out to California with $3,000 to her name and her youngest child “kicking and screaming.” There, she got a good job, rebuilt her credit, and with the money that eventually came to her through the sale of the Pennsylvania house (thanks to the pro bono work of a feminist lawyer sympathetic to women in her situation) she bought a small home in Santa Cruz.
In most of her nearly 50-year career, Jane focused in maternal-child health. For three years, though, she worked as a sexual assault nurse examiner for children at St. Michael’s Medical Center in Silverdale, “the worse and best job” she ever had. “We did so much good in the community and with children. But let me tell you. I still have some of those kids in my head. I mean, it was a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job… So it got to be a little too much.” The final chapters in Janes’s career were in homecare, tending to those with diabetes or requiring wound and post-surgical care. The work was deeply satisfying. “I would see people on Bainbridge Island, this largely wealthy, beautiful island, who were in dire straits, who were lonely. It was very eye opening.”
Jane is also an artist. “In the mid-90s I was working as a nurse practitioner, and the bureaucracy was killing me… I took a course called ‘Clay Is the Way’ with this wonderful artist in Santa Cruz, and it changed my life. I’m telling you, my divorce changed my life, but this changed it for the better.” For a time, she had her own studio in Rolling Bay, where she made her clay sculptures—figurines inspired by the sea (mermaids, terns, fish), portraits of dogs commissioned by their owners, female nudes, and animal-shaped vessels. Today she works out of Heart and Soul, where she also teaches handbuilding, and at home in a tiny studio at the foot of her bed bathed in light from floor-to-ceiling windows.
After her many moves, Jane sees no reason to leave the Oliver. She is close to a daughter and grandchildren, feels safe living on Bainbridge Island, and is able to get around easily, even without a car. “The transportation for older people here on Bainbridge is unheard of, except maybe in Europe,” she says, rattling off BI Ride, Kitsap Transit ACCESS, and a bus run by the Senior Center, never mind her supportive neighbors who coordinate with errands. The downtown location helps too. Some days, she hops on an ebike. She is a defensive rider with good reflexes and a keen awareness of her surroundings, a holdover from earlier days as a “crazy bicyclist” in California where she had both on- and off-road bikes and tackled single-track courses down mountains.
Jane affectionately refers to her home as her “own little palace.” At 500 square feet, the palace is indeed little. But a clever design, with not an inch of wasted space, means it comfortably accommodates her clay studio, a large secretary desk at which she is writing down her memories, and a pleasant living space in which to entertain. And then of course, there are the palace grounds—Bainbridge Island with its vibrant downtown and arts scene and her community of family, friends, artists, students, and neighbors. Jane has no plans to move.