Shortly before Europe was plunged into the Second World War, my young mother and her family traveled from their home in New York to France. This is a true story based on my grandmother's diaries, which document her daughter's early symptoms of men...
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Autumn 2008. Barbara Philips Affield on her farm in northern Minnesota. Blacksmith shop in background.
Prologue
A few months after my mother, Barbara, died in 2010 I discovered a time capsule—including my grandparent's urns— locked in the chickenhouse on our old farm homestead in northern Minnesota. It was obvious that she had never looked at the treasure.
Many letter packets were bound together by decades-old ribbon, string, brittle rubber bands, or rusted paper clips. Rodents had tunneled into ruptured boxes and gnawed documents. Urine had seeped and stained. Crumbled feces flecked pages. Freeze-dried mouse skeletons nestled near Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine, published in 1854. Dust hovered in sunbeams. The cache was water-damaged and mildewed. The smell, like a peripheral nightmare, has seeped and stained my memory.
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Thousands of documents lay in the decomposing heap, the earliest, a letter dated 1822 written by David Olmsted, Bedford, New York. I learned that he had served with the Connecticut Militia from 1778-1781 and had fought in the Hudson River campaigns during the Revolutionary War.
Why had my mother relegated our family history to the leaky-roofed outbuilding? Was it because of lifelong antipathy toward her mother? Or was she afraid of what she might discover? Our changing seasons fluctuate 160°. Thankfully the leaking roof and temperature extremes formed a crust over the treasure, protecting it, much as loose hay crowned atop a haystack will protect the forage beneath.
My sister, Laurel, and I spent several days excavating documents and artifacts from our past. I spent eight years sorting, studying, scanning and archiving.
I witnessed a heart-wrenching story unfold. As tiered decades revealed their secrets I began to understand incongruities my siblings and I had been raised with. I came to realize that this saga possessed literary and human depths that dwarfed the decomposing heap my sister and I rescued from the chickenhouse. Eight years later, when I open a tote-box to review a document, chickenhouse smell wafts, reawakening the memory.
My grandmother, Elsie Fratt Philips's writings are instrumental in illuminating that time before I was born. I owe her a debt of gratitude. Elsie's stewardship of our family history and her vigilant documentation of her own life provide a unique window to that past. After she died in 1984 my mother inherited the collection and had it shipped from Seattle, Washington, to our farm in northern Minnesota.
