Time Capsule
“You can’t take a picture of this, it’s already gone,” Nate’s ghost whispers to Claire when she wants to photograph her family in the series finale of the HBO television show “Six Feet Under.”
When I was a child, my parents remodeled our Little Green Bungalow by tearing out walls to open more space. Before the wall was sealed with drywall, I placed a letter to the future in the new wall of the kitchen.
I was all of about 9 or 10 at the time, but the letter detailed the house’s history (my parents purchased it brand spanking new in 1948), our family’s history and our current family members and dogs names. I don’t know where I got the idea; millennium time capsules weren’t even on the radar in the early 1970s. Perhaps I had heard of some other time capsule project or maybe I got the idea from all of those archeologist books I scanned in my childhood (my mother wanted me to grow up to be an archeologist in the worst way!)
Whatever gave me the initial idea, it was renewed last year watching a show called “If Walls Could Talk,” a show that documents people finding cool reminders of their home’s history. Old bottles, children’s toys lost in floorboards and dropped into unsealed walls, even letters and photographs hidden away for decades and even centuries.
On this show, the walls really do offer a window into the past.
When we were building The Belle Writer’s Studio in 2008, I decided to write another letter to the future and drop it into an unfinished wall of my office.
