Story Frame 68 – The Prophetic Dreams of a Child, Hidden in a 100 Year Old Cellar

Journal entry 13 May 2011 – There have probably been a hundred moments – words said, observed behavior, snatches of conversation, a thousand impressions perhaps, like confetti sparkling in the air all around me as I walk through time. Some good, some not so good, these tiny memory photos, each one patiently waiting til they reach critical mass, and I begin to see the path they’ve created.

In the midst of my Under the Appalachian Sun house renovations, I decided to tackle some of the boxes of old papers and ephemera I’d hastily stashed in the cellar when I moved into the house. I didn’t love the cellar. One hundred years old, it had a dirt floor, cobwebs and a lot of dust. Once upon a time, coal had been stored in one corner of it.

With its massive stones, low ceilings, and very little daylight, I thought the main area could be turned into an amazing wine cellar with small bistro tables, candles and checkered tablecloths. But I had neither the money nor the energy to realize this vision. Besides, there was always so much else to do upstairs.

Looking at a pile of boxes the movers had stashed on some old shelves, I was tempted to toss everything into the bin and just be done with it. But then I thought, what if there’s something hidden in all these boxes that I haven’t looked at in years, something I might actually want? That thought has derailed progress before. But seriously, what if?

And so it began, the process of putting on gloves and opening up box after box of old papers, letters, magazines, photographs and stuff – as in the stuffing, the inner guts of what filled the belly of my cellar.

I hauled a few boxes out onto my front porch so I could (hopefully) be distracted by people passing by. Much went right into the bin. But when I came across an old scrapbook of postcards I had put together when I was just eight or nine years old, I paused a moment. The last time I’d actually looked inside it, I was a teenager. Old and musty now I thought, one quick look, then I’ll toss it.

Between sips of tea, I turned the pages. Childish handwriting labeled where the postcards had come from — Denmark, Africa, Italy, Switzerland, Spane, Floridia, Greece & America.

They were glued down so I couldn’t see the writing. I didn’t remember many of them, much less who’d sent them, but coming from a multi-generational family of travelers, the collection wasn’t a surprise.

The postcards from Denmark were likely from my Danish grandparents who lived in Copenhagen. When I was seven, we visited them there, spending a few days on Skagen, a very cold beach in northern Denmark. Mom and I returned to that same beach together many years later on one of our three around-the-country roadtrips. And in my twenties, I’d worked for a Danish textiles company, fallen in love with a Danish guy, and traveled there often.

Then there were a couple from Paris, where I would live as an au pair, or nanny, for a long hot French summer just ten years after putting together that scrapbook. I whizzed around the Arc de Triomphe, beautifully lit up, very late one night, clinging to a friend on the back of a motorcycle. And here was a postcard of it.

I kept turning the pages.

There were postcards from Zurich, which I explored briefly in my twenties, on my way to a week of skiing in the French Alps with my Danish boyfriend. And some from Italy, where I would travel for two different careers – initially to Venice for textile design in the 80s, and then again, a decade later to other parts of Italy to shoot American Byzantine.

There was a long-forgotten postcard from my sister, written the summer she was hitchhiking in Greece. I’d just been in Athens with Zoë and Leif the previous year, for my nephew Jon’s wedding.

The more pages I turned, the stranger it got. I caught my breath, slowly realizing that I had been to almost every single place (with the exception of Ireland and the Philippines) that I had received a postcard from as a little girl. Despite sitting in the darkest corners of my homes for so many years, neglected, it was eerie how prophetic this scrapbook had turned out to be, as if it had been just quietly waiting.

I kept going. There were even postcards from Mount Vernon in the collection that I didn’t remember at all. As a nine- or ten-year-old child living in London, I would not yet have known what Mount Vernon was. And yet I ended up living there for five of my married-with-children-years.

And the postcard of the pounding surf in ‘Coastal Carolina?’ The kids and I enjoyed a number of holidays on the beaches of North Carolina when they were small. And Zoë spent four university years there.

There was also a postcard from Geneva, where I would visit her the year after she graduated.

And then there were postcards of exotic birds and animals from Africa where my grandfather lived at the time, and where I would spend a few weeks researching a book on my grandmother’s adventures, many years later.

How very strange that this simple postcard collection became a child’s vision board – an illustrated map of so many of the very places that would become meaningful to me over the coming decades.

Pondering this, I took a break from the mustiness and memories and went inside for a bite to eat.

Later that afternoon, I returned to the porch to tackle one last box. As I pulled out yet another handful of papers, a torn fragment of newspaper slipped out and fell to the floor. I picked it up to see what it was. It was a clipping from a book review — not the whole thing, just a fragment of it. And on it, these words were underlined:

“The dreams of a child become the journeys of a woman.”

Kristin Fellows is a published writer, world traveler, and a well-seasoned documentary film consultant. When not writing, Kristin can often be found listening to someone’s story or behind the lens of one of her cameras.

More about Kristin @ kristinfellowswriter.com

[above photo by me, taken in Italy, 1984]