In our new home far away from the ranch I recently encountered a demanding box of old paperwork that I have been neglecting to sort through. It has many of the photos, documents and letters that formed the basis of this blog. When I started sorting through the material many years ago it spread over an entire home office. I think I missed my true calling as a museum curator as most people would have delegated the papers to the burn pile. The papers had been stored in my grandparents attic. My grandparents did not prescribe to the legal requirements of keeping documents for 7 years, but rather a lifetime. I have farm receipts dating back to 1952. My great-grandmother Caroline was a postcard collector. There were stacks of postcards carefully tied together with string. Many of them had not been written on, bought for collection purposes. There is a folder of letters and cards of condolences that my grandmother received on the passing of her son, John, in 1951, including the telegram informing her of his car accident. They are all in the original folder, labelled John. There were even some notes of the kind that would be left on a counter top. The most heart wrenching is one that my grandmother wrote to her husband Gus, informing him that she had to go to town to see her brother who was not well. She told him that there was soup on the stove for him, signing off with "I love you so terribly much". Included is even a note that I wrote myself, on the back of a map of the farm, titled "Caroline's Pie". My grandmother was a gifted pie maker which started me on the path as a pie lover. I had the greedy tendency to reserve leftover slices for myself.
Over the years I have sorted and discarded items from this collection. It is hard to throw things away that have been kept so long and with such intention, but on a practical level there is just not enough room to keep everything. Unlike my grandparents I don't have an attic where I can put things and then forget about them. Our town house has painfully little storage room, unlike the days when we lived on the farm with out-outbuildings and a large house with eaves, perfect for putting boxes of things that you did not know what to do with. In my latest effort to diminish the collection I went from a large plastic tote to a small suitcase. There are some things that I can not yet bear to throw out although I probably should. The old diaries and keepsake photo albums are so intensely personal, but yet I continue to keep them. There is a journal that is ineligible, due in part to the faded hard to read script, but also some of the writing appears to be in code. I don't even know who the journal belongs to. Part of my motivation to reduce the amount of material is thinking of my children one day being faced with deciding what to do with all detritus of my life. There is not the volume now as there was in the past with photos being digital and letters mostly replaced by emails. I wonder though if some of that history will be lost. For a number of months this blog disappeared due to the webpage expiring. It was complicated to retrieve it and made me reflect on how impermanent the digital age is. After the blog incident I made a digital will to share with my children in an effort to preserve the photos and written history.
I am the curator of the farm history, a role I have invested hours of research into. It is a story I never tire of.
The collection now only takes up a table top instead of an entire room.
A reminder of my childhood greed for pie.
The photo albums and diaries.
There was a much larger assortment of old receipts, but I kept only those that are the most interesting such as the one on top from the Salmon Arm Farming Exchange, dated 1952.
The unknown author of this diary had difficult hand writing to read, and may be writing in code.
Over the years I have sorted and discarded items from this collection. It is hard to throw things away that have been kept so long and with such intention, but on a practical level there is just not enough room to keep everything. Unlike my grandparents I don't have an attic where I can put things and then forget about them. Our town house has painfully little storage room, unlike the days when we lived on the farm with out-outbuildings and a large house with eaves, perfect for putting boxes of things that you did not know what to do with. In my latest effort to diminish the collection I went from a large plastic tote to a small suitcase. There are some things that I can not yet bear to throw out although I probably should. The old diaries and keepsake photo albums are so intensely personal, but yet I continue to keep them. There is a journal that is ineligible, due in part to the faded hard to read script, but also some of the writing appears to be in code. I don't even know who the journal belongs to. Part of my motivation to reduce the amount of material is thinking of my children one day being faced with deciding what to do with all detritus of my life. There is not the volume now as there was in the past with photos being digital and letters mostly replaced by emails. I wonder though if some of that history will be lost. For a number of months this blog disappeared due to the webpage expiring. It was complicated to retrieve it and made me reflect on how impermanent the digital age is. After the blog incident I made a digital will to share with my children in an effort to preserve the photos and written history.
I am the curator of the farm history, a role I have invested hours of research into. It is a story I never tire of.
Gus and Renee's attic. Circa 1990s, taken just before that part of the house was destroyed. This is where most of the material used for this story was stored. Photo credits Gordon Milne.
The collection now only takes up a table top instead of an entire room.
What remains of my great-grandmother's postcard collection.
The photo albums and diaries.
The unknown author of this diary had difficult hand writing to read, and may be writing in code.
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