Under the Floorboards

If you’ve been around here for long enough, you know the story about how my grandma went to an auction sale to buy a buggy and accidentally bought a whole house for $500 instead. Or, as well, rather. You know that she was 80 at the time and didn’t know what to do with the house, which was a 1000 square foot, 100-year-old Eaton’s catalogue Foursquare farmhouse and a real fixer-upper. You know that she sent my mom a text that said, Oh! I just bought a house! And you know that my mom drove to Gravelbourg to see the house, fell in love with it, and promptly began the arduous, painstaking process of renovating it, top to bottom. 

You can read that whole story here, and see progress pics here.

I realized recently that I haven’t added newer progress pictures here in a long time—like, since 2018! I’ve done a little updating on Instagram, but not here. I’ll rectify this, I will, but FIRST. 

First.

Ask me what my mom found under the floorboards in the attic.

…

I’m so tempted to just end this blog post here and wait for a few days so you don’t get to know the answer to the question right away. I’m a sucker for a good cliff-hanger. I love making people wait, letting them wonder. I’m doing it right now! Isn’t it fun? 

(I’m getting the vibe from you, all the way from the other side of the computer screen and from back here in the past while I’m writing this to you, who will read it later today, that the whole making you wait and wonder is more fun for me than it is for you, and I’m sorry.) 

Okay, I'll tell you; I'll start at the beginning:

As I said, my mom and dad have been hard at work over the course of the past decade, fully renovating the first and second floors of the house. They've done the basement too, and they’ve landscaped the yard and planted a massive garden and built a garage. It is gorgeous. It is almost finished. There's just the attic left, which is going to become the master bedroom. 

So, it's often true, especially when it comes to very old houses, that before you can construct something, you have to take stuff apart a little. And it's also true, especially when it comes to very old houses, that when you take stuff apart, you might uncover...secrets. You might find things very purposefully tucked under floorboards. You might find, as my parents did, a letter from 1929, which begins, "Dear Ethel, I was so glad to hear from you and also to know that you arrived safely from prison to your home. We are all very well except that Lena Scottie is in the hospital sick with Diptheria."

The letter, which I will link to below, is five pages long, and in it, the sender implores Ethel to become a Catholic, and tells her that "all the Mothers and Children" miss her and talk about her a lot. The return address on the letter is St Agnes Priory School in Manitoba, a place where 'delinquent girls' were sent to be reformed (delinquent in the 1920s could mean anything from "has engaged in criminal activity" to "is a single mother" or "is neurodivergent"). It's not an overly juicy letter, other than the mention of prison or the fact that it was sent by one of the other "delinquent girls" at St. Agnes, but that almost makes it more interesting, doesn't it? Why hide a letter like that? Or, if you didn't want it to be discovered, why not rip it up, or burn it? 

My mom is not the kind of person to say, "Oh, a letter addressed to someone else; not my circus! Not my monkeys!" Which is good, because I'm really nosy and would like to know why Ethel hid the letter, and why Ethel was in jail, and also what happened to Ethel, period. 

So Mom called up one of the family members of the original person who built the house. She said, "Hey, I've got a letter here for the person who lived in this house who went to prison." 

And they were like, "Prison?!"

And she was like, "Yeah, the letter was hidden."

And they were like, "Much like the fact that we had a relative who went to prison!"

Luckily, this person is kind of like my mom and me; they are also not a not-my-circus-not-my-monkeys type. They immediately launched into a full-scale investigation, interviewing other family members, driving to grave yards, even calling the office of St. Agnes, asking for intake records. You can read all of their findings, as well as the full letter, here and an update here. 

It's wild, isn't it, to think about old houses, about how some secrets stay hidden and some make themselves known? It's wild to think about this woman, Ethel, who hid this letter instead of destroying it. Did it cross her mind that someday someone might find it and care enough to uncover her story, that members of her family might get to know her that way where previously she was kept a secret? I always think about how important it is to us, as humans, to be known and understood, and in reading Ethel's story, I don't get the sense that she was (I mean, one of the things this family member dug up was a newspaper clipping that told the story about how the Phillipsons came to Canada from England. It talked about all seven of their children, where they ended up, who they married, where they worked, but when it got to Ethel, all it said was, "Ethel, died young").

So, I don't know, I guess I'm glad for all of this, is what I'm saying. Glad for Ethel and her family. Glad for my mom, too—who among us has not dreamed of the day we might find a secret letter hidden under the floorboards in the attic of a 100-year-old house?

Just me? I think not.