We slept surprisingly late again today. In fact, I confused the heck out of myself by taking Z back to her bed in the middle of the night and laying down with her. I promptly fell asleep, and when I woke up I had one of those "where the hell am I?" moments.
By the time we were all ready to go, it was after ten. We went for breakfast at a crepe place (my suggestion: for some reason I remembered that they had good coffee, but also thought they had more variety in a display case of baked goodies), and my older sister-in-law, who was working, called to say she was already off! We all ate some breakfast and went on a shopping expedition together. We went back to the vintage shop where we bought the chair and Sweetie lusted over a coffee table (honestly, depending on how much it might cost to ship, it might end up at our house), and I tried on a couple dresses. Two were super-cute and fit nicely, so I got them. One has an alligator on it, and the clerk wrote it up as a Lacoste, but I'm not sure... the label says something like "David Crystal." Whatever; I care way less about labels than whether something looks fabulous, and this does. Sweetie even got a vintage shirt!
Then we went to the rock shop a few doors down. It had a lot of nice little crystals and minerals and whatnot, but absolutely reeked of burning sage, which I cannot stand. I don't really think of myself as a hippie, but if there was a checklist, I admit I'd check quite a few of the hippie boxes. Still, I draw the goddamn line at sage, patchouli, nag champa... I am kind of sensitive to smells anyway, and those three in particular are just so strong and awful. Couldn't the hippies enjoy, oh, citron? And not burning, but gently wafting somehow? Anyway, Sweetie bought a cool fish fossil and Z got a purple rock and I got out with my sinuses intact.
We went to another store that was an eclectic mix. There were some vintage clothes, but also some repurposed clothing, some steampunk stuff, some stuff that was clearly meant for the Burning Man crowd, and a few new items. I bought a pair of really cute socks, but some of it left me shaking my head. We peered into a few other shops (one of those "everything is handmade from bamboo and costs $150" places") and a glass shop my dad would have liked, and then we split up.
(I'm tired of nicknames for now. My sisters-in-law are named Michelle and Maryam, and I'm just going to use their names.) Michelle and I picked up her mom and headed out of town to Cottage Grove. I was leery. My MiL had said there was a book of genealogy about her family in the Cottage Grove library, and I had figured out enough to know that there was a Cottage Grove genealogical library. But the numbers on a page I had didn't seem to relate to any kind of charts I'd seen, and there was no mention on the pages of any book. It was all about this one great-aunt's personal records, and it seemed she had made up the numbering system herself.
Cottage Grove was lovely. I mean, talk about your charming little towns, Cottage Grove is one of the prettiest I've been to. We passed a covered bridge, several murals on the little main street, which was filled with cafes and book/garden/gift stores, not to mention a multitude of little Victorians, Bungalows, and transitional homes, mostly with quaint little gardens bursting with gladiolas, shasta daisies, sweet peas... I know my mom would love it. We parked across the street from the museum, a two-building affair filled with odds and ends from military uniforms to buggies to arrowheads and woven baskets, to a fainting couch and an old wheelchair. It was small, but nicely arranged and obviously lovingly cared-for.
Then we went into the library. I was really surprised to see their filing system. Common names had their own manila folder, and less-common ones were filed together. Every paper was a sheet of white typing paper with either handwriting on it or cut-and-pasted (old-school, with scissors and glue) obituaries, marriage and birth announcements. There was no order, no chronology. If you died, and your last name was "Smith," someone just cut out the notice, glued it to the "Smith" paper, and moved along. You might be glued next to someone you're not even related to -- it doesn't matter.
I asked gently, "Wow, so are there any plans to put all this on microfiche or on the computer?" The ladies laughed a little. No, there were not.
As you can imagine, this was not that useful for me.
We found a book that MiL's great-aunt had compiled, and I was AWESTRUCK by what it contained. She had apparently spent about forty years compiling everything that ever happened to anyone named Hayes, Haynes, Hanes, Hains, Haines, Hain, etc. There was a gazette she published periodically, and each issue was just like this:
Haynes, Benjamin. M. Clara Benjamin. 1962.
Haines, Jerome. D. 1962.
Now imagine holding an eight-pound book of that. There was an index, but it didn't seem to include many people outside the Haynes clan and sadly, that was her father's side of the family -- not related to my husband's family at all.
Ah, but wait! One of the women remembers that there might be something upstairs! She heads up and comes down a handful of minutes later with two slender file drawers. In each are five nearly cubic rubber-banded sheafs of note paper. One is thick like card stock, while the other is like vellum. A five-inch-deep stack of these probably contained 500 sheets. Each paper was hand-written. They were in no order but alphabetical. There were no reference numbers. Almost non contained the names of parents or children. A few had spouses. Most just had birth and death dates. These, like the Haynes book, contained every possible spelling of the selected last names, leaving me to wonder whether these slips of paper contained anything useful at all. Is a Stanley Ayde born in 1880 related to a Catherine Addy born in 1910? Who knows? Well, the woman who compiled them would have, I suppose, but she's dead. In short, it was pretty fruitless.
But then we went back to the main street and found a cafe with retro 50s chairs and tableware, and we had some really delicious pizza (if only I could get my crust to do that!), and we sat in perfect weather and listened as a young guitarist (with whom Zadie fell instantly in love) played, and we looked at the murals and the passers-by and used a clean and well-decorated public restroom, and then we took the old highway back to Eugene. So you know, it wasn't a waste of a day. It was lovely.
Even better, when we got back I discovered that Sweetie had bought me a gift! Two cards (I'm a sucker for stationery) and a big box of Euphoria truffles (worth the name, I tell you).
At home, we decided to try a new place for dinner called Laughing Planet. I asked if they had any locations in California after we ate, because I LOVEd it. Pretty much everything is based around beans, rice, and various toppings, but they had lovely little salads, a couple dishes with plantains, it was all fresh, the iced tea was delicious, a glance at the pie made me drool a little, and the whole place was decorated in super-awesome outsider art.
And finally, to Prince Puckler's! We all enjoyed some ice cream and sat on the playground in the twilight.
More pictures soon, I promise. I hope things are well with you all.
No comments:
Post a Comment