Have you ever opened a time capsule? Or perhaps even placed one?

Maybe you don’t even know what it is?

Well, in case you don’t know - a time capsule is like a stash of items placed somewhere to be opened later.

Sometimes the placement of the time capsule is well marked — as I remember doing back in elementary school when they rebuilt the school — they put it in a cornerstone. It was easily viewable but still required some demolition to open it up. It had a plaque on it to describe who placed it, why and when it should be opened.

Sometimes the placement is hidden, to be discovered by accident or happenstance. We did something like this at my childhood home in Indiana. We had to dig a water or drain line of some sort in the backyard all the way to the alley. It was a long trench about chest-height on an average sized adult. I was grade school age at the time and always on the short side so this trench was deeper than I was tall — as I recall!

When we finished the project, I have a faded memory of filling one of Mom’s coffee cans with treasures, and probably a note.

Honestly, I don’t have a clue what we put in there, but I remember doing it. It had a feeling of whimsy and excitement. We were burying treasure for someone to find later.

A fossil of time, if you will. I believe we placed this time capsule in our backyard sometime in the late 1980’s. Perhaps 1987 or 88, when I was about 8 — that feels accurate.

I suspect we put in a newspaper clipping, maybe a matchbook, a couple coins dated that year, perhaps even a handwritten note from my brother and me.

Creating and placing this time capsule was just another one of those cool, odd and quirky things my family did. Obviously the memory of this experience was a treasure to me — and hopefully (or not?) one day someone will unearth our actual time capsule treasure? It remains to be seen!

Why am I sharing this?

Well, because we sorta unearthed our own time capsule here on the farm recently…and we’ve actually placed one as well. So I thought I’d share.

Back in 2021 when we did a massive renovation on the exterior of the farmhouse, we took of every board of 150+ year old cedar siding. It was in rough shape and we needed proper sheeting & insulation, along with new windows and trim. As we made our way around the house, we started writing on the new plywood sheeting.

I figured it was a good way to say “howdy there” to anyone who may come along after us and need to make a repair. I mean, who doesn’t want to leave their mark - amiright?

As this major project went on — it took the entire summer because we did it ourself — we continually marveled at how the house was built all those years ago. It is balloon framed meaning the wall studs go from the sill plate to the roof line. Nowadays, the wall studs only go to the next level, then the floor, then the next wall stud.

Seeing the different style framing was pretty cool, as was being able to see between the main floor ceiling and the upstairs floor. By the time we got east side of the house where our bedroom is — I had the idea to make a proper time capsule to tuck in the space between the ceiling and the floor.

In an old Fannie May chocolate tin, I included a few pieces of life from 2021 for whomever may come after us.

In it, I included —

two business cards for the farm — one for Old Homestead Alpacas and one for Gholson Gardens
a shiny 2021 quarter
a very small ball of our left over naturally dyed alpaca yarn
a machine knit sample using our yarn
one of our logo labels
a party favor from our 2004 wedding - a matchbook sized note pad that I also scribbled a note on
a garment tag from a SpaceX t-shirt
dried flowers from the garden
a recent copy of our County Tax Assessor showing the current market value of the farm
and a teensy bit of weed - because what stash box is complete without it - and because it was legal at the time and perhaps maybe it won’t be when it’s discovered

If it’s not already obvious what a nerd I am, I will reiterate: the thrill of making this time capsule, choosing the bits to include, placing it and now reliving it here still gives me goosebumps.

In my heart of hearts, I hope someone does find it, and I pray to the Universe it’s because they just have to replace a floorboard or something and it’s not for some other reason…

Occasionally things around the farm will bubble up to the surface. We have tons of moles and voles that are always unearthing broken bits of glass bottles for us, but we haven’t yet had a major discovery.

At least until we started the big kitchen renovation this past fall. As we were gently removing the old cabinetry, we noticed old wallpaper. We had seen lots of layers of wallpaper before when we removed the drop ceilings back in 2014.

Mike was standing on the counters inspecting how to remove one of the upper cabinets without destroying them. They’re still very solid pieces and are now currently hanging in the dye house.

The cabinets went mostly all the way up to the ceiling, where they stopped there was a decorative topper that took them all the way up.

As soon as Mike removed the decorative topper, he peered over the top of the cabinet to see where it was secured to the wall. After vacuuming out a lot of dust and critter/bug debris (!!) he hollered that there was something written on the cabinet!

Something was written in pencil hastily, and in that classic old timey cursive script.

It looked like a name and a partial address as the Walla Walla was pretty evident. It took some squinting and head tilting but I figured out what was written.