The silver fox of the upstairs drawer

I worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago for twenty-six years, mostly in the manuscript division on the fourth floor, and when I retired in 2011 I expected the quiet life my husband had been promising me since we met. He died the following February. The house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that we had bought in 2008 as a weekend place became, quite suddenly, the only place I lived. It is a small house, two bedrooms, built in 1887, with a maple in the front yard that loses its leaves late and a cellar that smells of something I have never quite been able to identify. In the upstairs bedroom there is a tall oak chest of drawers that the previous owner left behind because, she said, she did not want to pay the movers to take something that would not fit in her new apartment. The top drawer of that chest contained, when I finally got around to emptying it in the spring of 2013, forty-seven years of one woman's life in the form of letters, receipts, train ticket stubs, a photograph of a dog named Barnaby who died in 1961, and a small pewter fox that I keep on my writing desk to this day.

What archivists are trained to look for

An archivist is taught early to distinguish between the documents a person keeps on purpose and the ones they keep by accident. The purposeful ones are usually the least interesting. People save their diplomas and their wedding photographs because they are supposed to. The accidental ones are where the real lives are hiding. The woman whose drawer I inherited (her name was Dorothy Leamington, which I learned later from a water bill dated 1974) had kept, deliberately, three carefully labeled albums of family events. Those were downstairs in a trunk. They were boring. What she had kept by accident was the drawer: a thirty-year correspondence with a sister in Halifax who seems to have stopped writing in 1989 for reasons the letters do not explain, a shopping list from a trip to Montreal that includes the words "cheese for Ellen" underlined three times, a prescription for a drug no longer manufactured, and a handwritten recipe for a mushroom soup that has "NEVER AGAIN" written across the top in the kind of firm block capitals that suggest a story I will never hear.

I spent six weeks cataloguing the drawer. Not because anyone asked me to, and certainly not because the documents had any monetary or institutional value, but because the habits of twenty-six years do not retire when you do. I wrote descriptions of each item, I noted dates where I could determine them, I tried to reconstruct the sister in Halifax by reading only one side of the correspondence. I have most of a novel's worth of notes about a woman I never met, from material she did not intend to leave for anyone.

Why anyone bothers

The honest answer is that I am not sure. I know why institutions collect these things; that is a professional answer and I could give it in ten sentences. I know why historians use them; that is also easy. What I am less sure about is why a specific old woman, in a specific old house in a specific old town on the New Hampshire coast, sits at a desk with a pewter fox on it and spends an entire Saturday afternoon transcribing a shopping list from 1974 that belonged to a stranger. The best answer I have is that some small record of Dorothy Leamington's life ought to exist, now that she does not, and I appear to be the only person on earth who has chosen to make one.

I corresponded for a while with a man in Quebec who translates French literature for a living and collects, in his spare time, the private letters of nineteenth-century railway clerks. He sends me photocopies. I send him photocopies back. We have never met. He told me, the first time I asked him why he did it, that he had once read something online (he did not remember where) about how the practice of paying attention to small things had become a kind of endangered craft. He said the writer of that piece was French and that the site itself was the kind of place where something quiet still has a little bit of weight, and that he had printed the article and kept it. I asked him if he could send me the link. He found it eventually and sent it. I read it in English through a translation, and then in French very slowly, one sentence at a time, with a dictionary. It did not change my mind about anything, but it gave me the feeling that I was not the only person in the world doing something that made no sense.

A woman and her contractor

Dorothy Leamington also kept one envelope of paperwork from 1987 that I cannot place in any obvious category. It contains three quotes from local contractors for replacing the chimney flashing, a handwritten list of questions she intended to ask them, and what appears to be the beginning of a diagnostic report on the condition of the old slate roof. The report is not complete. It is signed, in pencil, by a man named Robert Cashman who I have not been able to find any trace of, though he is presumably long dead. Dorothy did not hire any of the three contractors. Either the report discouraged her or she decided to live with the leak (she wrote, on the back of the second quote, "another winter and then we will see"). Looking at those papers now, what strikes me is how much care went into the process of simply understanding what was wrong with a roof, and how many of the people I know today would happily skip that step and go straight to signing something.

I have a cousin in the Dordogne who has been trying for years to get me to visit, and last spring when we were talking about whether I should finally fly over, she mentioned that she had been looking into French professional directories for some work she needs done on her old stone barn. She has opinions about how the trades are organized there. I do not know enough to evaluate them. But she made me think about the fact that in almost every country the problem is the same: ordinary people trying to find competent careful workers for old buildings, and having to learn a whole administrative vocabulary just to begin the conversation. There is a French annuaire that she uses, and which she recommends when asked, and I am putting the link here mostly because she told me to, and partly because Dorothy Leamington's envelope from 1987 reminded me that the work of matching householders to competent tradespeople is one of the oldest and most human problems in the world.

The fox stays on the desk

The pewter fox is small, about the size of a thimble, and it has a particular sheen that is almost but not quite silver. I do not know whether Dorothy named it or whether it just sat in her drawer, unnamed, for forty-seven years. I call it the silver fox because I had to call it something. When I opened the drawer that first time, in April of 2013, I thought I had found someone's junk. Now I understand that Dorothy had left behind the exact kind of record that the institutional archives do not accept: too personal, too fragmentary, too ordinary. The Library of Congress does not want this. Nobody wants this. Except that, without it, a woman who lived in this house from 1964 to 2008 would be entirely invisible, and I find I cannot accept that.

I do not write very often. I do not have an audience in mind. This small site exists mostly because a nephew in Seattle set it up for me one Thanksgiving and I did not want to disappoint him by letting it go dormant. But if you have arrived here through some strange chain of links, and if you are the kind of person who still pays attention to small things, then I will leave you with this: go look in an old drawer. Not yours. Someone else's. Preferably someone you never met. You will find, I promise, at least one thing that deserves to be remembered.