I’ve always loved history – from, well evers I suppose. Reading about places gone, my first visit to St. Augustine, when I was 8 ish, created tales of forts and swashbuckling and Spanish ladies in their mantillas. History gives us the pieces of the known as we add our artistic spins to the might-have-been, the mystery.
My great-aunt Weeta, now her house was a treasure trove of what might-have-been. Not a blood relative, there was a mutual adoption between my family and her spinster sisters and her. Born in 1897, saw Halley’s comet in 1910, married in 1914, father was a cattle baron of central Florida. (Now cattle –baron is truly my spin on the tale, but Mr. Carpenter did amass a nice chunk of estate from the cattle industry – everyone involved in any part of the story is dead, and besides, this is my tale, not yours!) She went on to marry Hamp Brown, who was a boarder of her mama’s and who made his money in oranges (as once upon a time, we all could in Florida before the greedy housing developers raped our lands).
As a young girl, who was boisterous and who needed to stay out of the way of the three sisters, as I made them nervous, I was frequently in rooms by myself where I could look through photo albums from an era I had only studied – now here was pieces of time gone by with faces I knew. Here was the house where I grew up in – with the original owners standing out front of in the 1940’s. Here were the sisters on a river cruise…one could only wonder about their story – who they had met along their journey.
I jumped into the river of nostalgia when Daddy died – I think everyone gets to that point at some time or another in their thirties, I HAD to for necessity for my mental state, for Daddy was my entire life, and to cope, I put myself back into my childhood – remembering life with Daddy and Papa and then mama, who died a year later.
This brings me to today - May 28, 2008. They’ve torn down all the places where I lived growing up – all that’s left is boxes. Every time I come back to Florida (I’m in the middle of figuring out where “home” is, so it’s hard to say coming “home” to Florida) I go through some more boxes. Today they were Daddy’s – looking at the complex puzzle pieces of who he was.
The part of him that saved everything and it’s part of my history too. So unlike if I’m reading someone’s biography and reading photocopied old records, or seeing them stored in a museum, or seeing a land deed signed by Patrick Henry at my Aunt Alicia’s (since we’re supposed related to him) – THIS is most different, for Daddy’s story is intertwined with mine and fills in blanks I didn’t know I had. Daddy was complex and Daddy first so many of his complexities, I was just beginning to understand when he died, and now I have these boxes. What he chose to keep, from cards of mine, to various receipts or church bulletins…it was like he was right with me, I can see him so clearly. And while that’s hard, it’s comforting at the same time.
We keep our life in papers, photos and boxes, the boot of our cars….we make little altars everywhere constantly leaving clues of who we are and what’s important to us. And it’s not until we are completing the clues of the mystery of those we love best that we really begin to know how to read those clues.
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This is one of those things I began in May. And by the time I came back to it - the idea and flow had lost steam. Perhaps if I were to go back into the boxes. I will, to be sure, just not today.
