A time capsule returns

On the eve of selling her family’s house, Donna Miscolta’s daughter had a special request: Go to the stairwell and pull back the loose board on the bottom step.

There, Donna found a box of treasures that 9-year-old Ana Miscolta Cameron had hidden for future children living in the house.

Rediscovering this time capsule allowed Donna and Ana to revisit memories from the past, hopes for the future, and where mother and daughter diverge and meet in the middle.

Related Links:

Donna’s blog post about the time capsule

Ten Thousand Things is produced by KUOW in Seattle. Our host, writer, and creator is Shin Yu Pai. Whitney Henry-Lester produced this episode. Jim Gates is our editor. Tomo Nakayama wrote our theme music. Additional music in this episode by coldbrew, Jaylon Ashaun, and Gracie and Rachel.

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Partial funding of Ten Thousand Things was made possible by the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture Hope Corps Grant, a recovery funded program of the National Endowment for the Arts, plus support from The Windrose Fund.

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Transcript:

Shin Yu Narration: It wasn't until the pandemic that I, like a whole lot of other people, actually started to hang out at home. I stopped going into an office downtown everyday, and spent more time relating to the space where I live. This was an anomaly for me, having grown up in a house with a leaky roof and water-stained ceilings, a place that I constantly wanted to escape.

On the days that my husband takes our son to school, I sink into the silence of our house. Get reacquainted with each room. Some walls are a snapshot in time of my child's evolving artwork. Then there's my kid's height chart in the dining room - faint penciled lines marking his growth over the past two years. My son will remember the memories we made here. Putting up a Christmas tree in the same corner of the living room every year. Where he learned to make rice and bake cookies in the kitchen. Practice his cursive at the dining room table. And me? I'll remember other things. The sound of my kid's bedroom door slamming shut in anger behind him. That time that the hot water heater quietly broke and gallons of water seeped into the carpet on my birthday.

My home is a vessel of living history and time and a record of my relationship to my family. For better or worse. And because of that, my relationship with it is complicated.

Donna Miscolta's relationship with her house was complicated too.

Donna Miscolta: When we bought the house in 1984, it was supposed to be a fixer upper, it was supposed to be a first house, and we would eventually move to a better place, a bigger place to raise our kids.

That never happened,

Shin Yu Narration: when we're young, life can feel full of promise.

We have hopes and dreams. For better futures. For a house of our own. For a sense of refuge.

And then there's the reality.

Of fighting over the rising costs of bills. home maintenance. and how to deal with house pests. Donna's husband had to deal with whatever crawled inside the house through a hole in the roof.

Donna Miscolta: We thought he trapped rats, but it turned out they were squirrels. He kept them because he didn't want to release them because they would just come right back.

And so he bought this giant cage and kept it in the garage and he looked up at how to feed squirrels, and so every morning he would chop all these fresh fruits and vegetables for them and feed the squirrels and, they would go crazy.

Shin Yu Narration: Donna's husband fed the squirrels for about a month until the rain stopped and it was safe for him to get on the roof and patch the holes.

Donna lived in that fixer-upper for more than three decades. In that house, she raised two girls, Natalie and Ana, who grew into their young adulthood under that tattered roof. but Donna finally reached her limit of living in discomfort. And then the furnace broke.

Donna Miscolta: We had been living with, space heaters like I would live basically in two rooms, either the bedroom or the living room. And that's where we kept the heaters. We had just gotten so tired of living that way, that it was just like, we need to get outta here. And so we decided to sell.

Shin Yu Narration: Selling the family house mostly brought relief. But it also unearthed something unexpected and hidden.

Welcome to Ten Thousand Things

A podcast about modern artifacts of Asian American life.

I'm your host, Shin Yu Pai. Today, a time capsule.

When Donna went to sell her family's old home in Seattle ...she knew it wasn't going to a new family or even someone looking to flip it. It was going to a developer. To be torn down and replaced. The corners and niches and doorways of memories would be gone. This made her daughter, Ana, a bit nostalgic.

Donna Miscolta: She just said, could you do a video tour of all the rooms so I could have a memory of the house?

And so I did that for her.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: After I had watched the video of that last walkthrough of the house, I think something clicked in my mind and I remembered the stair and I remembered very, very fuzzily that I put something there as a child

So I asked my mom and I just said, I I think there's something there. , can you just check?

Donna Miscolta: I went there and there it was. And it was like lifting out some buried treasure

Ana Miscolta Cameron: And sure enough, it was there and I had left it there.

Shin Yu Narration: It was a blue Dutch cookie tin. A time capsule containing memories from the life of a nine-year-old Ana.

The secret space that Ana Miscolta Cameron found as a kid lived at the base of the house's staircase. The whole family passed over those stairs everyday.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: And so all of them were painted gray except for the bottom one. It was painted white and every time you stepped on it it, it made a noise as if it were hollow.

And it opened and it felt like a magical key. Like really, like I was just hoping it would open and then it did open

Shin Yu Narration: At the time, Ana was really into reading books. About princesses that lived in distant lands and olden times.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: I was very interested in history and, um, all of the time that separated me from this other person and. There's kind of a, there's a little bit of a morbid interest too of like the, the death and the drama associated with being a princess.

Shin Yu Narration: But Ana lived in 1999. In a post-grunge era Seattle. Though there were modern pop princesses too.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: That was probably the year Britney Spears' first album came out. And I remember listening to that a lot. And, um, just being immersed in pop culture generally,

Shin Yu Narration: She remembers staring at Britney's photo on the album cover and drinking in our culture's idea of beauty. Ana tried to emulate the sports bra and nylon sweatpants look from the Baby One More Time video. But her sister's hand-me-down pants were too long and made ugly noises as she squeaked down the hall.

9 year-old Ana felt pulled in many directions: caught up in the popular culture of the late 90s, while feeling drawn to the simplicity of princesses and past times. When and where did she belong?

So Ana made a time capsule. Created her own treasure box of cherished items to preserve for the future.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: I felt so much, so many connections with people from the past that I had read about, and I kind of wanted to continue that chain and be a link in the chain and send my message to someone in the future too.

I, I guess I had in my mind that, um, you know, a kid that lived in that house, maybe from the next family or, or even generations into the future would find it.

Shin Yu Narration: Reaching out to a kid across time was one way that Ana coped with a painful tween phase.

I went to an alternative school that was smaller than other elementary schools in the district, and there were very few students of color in the school.

It's an in-between age. In which a profound sense of loneliness can set in. We may begin to question where we belong and whether or not there's a place for us. For mixed-race kids like Ana, who is Filipino, Mexican, and white, that loneliness has a whole other dimension to it.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: There was a core of very cool kids. They were white, they were very thin, they were pretty and they usually had money. And they formed this kind of core that you aspired to get into.

Shin Yu Narration: The time capsule was Ana's secret. It stayed hidden beneath the stair.

Ana grew into a teenager. With new questions. And daughter and mother clashed.

Donna Miscolta: I don't know if my husband had been doing work on the roof, but there was a rope up there that was tied around the chimney, and she used that rope to shimmy down from the, the second floor of the house and leave at night.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: I think when I got into high school, things changed a lot and we had very difficult family dynamics. I was very mad at this inability to keep the peace in our household.

So I just felt like, well it's not gonna hurt anyone if I just shut up and go to my room, . Later on that lack of communication led to arguments.

Donna Miscolta: Ana made it out of adolescence and through college. She was living outside of the country when Donna decided to sell the house. With home prices soaring, old houses were snapped off the market all over Seattle. Donna didn't know anything about her daughter's secret stair.I was thinking, why didn't I not know about that stair? I was like walking up and down that stair so many times. Um, but I always knew when I hit that last step coming down, there was a hollow sound and it would like, you know, it could, it was sort of rock.

Shin Yu Narration: The discovery of Ana's time capsule pulled Donna back to a time, before struggling with her daughter. Before the silence. And before the fights.

Donna Miscolta: So here's the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit cookies.

Shin Yu Narration: Ana's time capsule lived inside a blue, Dutch cookie tin that her mom once used as a sewing kit.

Donna Miscolta: There's our cat Jessie, there's our cat, Lily. Oh, this is a picture of Ana and her soccer team and then Ana on a bridge

Ana Miscolta Cameron: There was a, a little silver box, with little shapes brightly painted over it. It was a, an artist in box. Purchased at,one of those little Mexican craft stores and,

Donna Miscolta: um, coins and then also, Canadian, $5,

um, and then she had this letter to the future

Shin Yu Narration: A 9-year-old Ana had handwritten a letter to put inside her secret time capsule!

It was sealed in an envelope that said:

Donna Miscolta: Do not open until the year 3010.

Shin Yu Narration: Donna was curious, but she wasn't sure if she should open it.

Donna Miscolta: I kind of liked the idea of having it unopened. It was sort of this sacred thing to me, , and I think once it was opened, sort of that magic would disappear.

Shin Yu Narration: I read about Ana's letter to the future on Donna's blog. She wrote how a letter like this felt like it needed some sort of ritual.

I was producing this arts event with a live audience and so I invited Donna to open the letter on stage with me. Ana gave her permission to do it, but only if her mom promised to stop reading if there was anything embarassing.

Donna Miscolta on stage: So, I don't know, it's in the letter. And if she had written this when she was 13, no way would I be reading it in public. But here it is, the words of a 10 year old

Hello. From the 20th century

Okay. There are, there's , I guess it's a f there's a, it's a form. So she had found somewhere.

So the best things in my life are my family because I love them very much and they're always there to support me when I need it And also my cats Nina Lily Jesse and Piper.

My personal goals for the future are to become a soccer player, a singer, or an actress. They're all very important things I like to do in my free time.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: I was looking at myself you know, projecting what I would be in the future. And you know, I think wanting to be things like a pop star or an actress or a soccer player that's really about, um, the spotlight and that's about being loved and being appreciated and being adored.

They were kind of redeeming professions to a child that didn't fit in and that didn't feel, um, loved or popular.

and then there's also the part about, about looking outward at the world and wanting to do something selfless too.

Donna Miscolta on stage: My wishes for the future of the world are for people to stop polluting the planet and for people to stop killing, hating and hurting.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: I remember being very aware of environmental issues at a young age because of my mom's job, and she worked in, uh, recycling education. .

So I think there was a contrast in that letter to the future, I wanna make things better for me, and I also wanna make things better for the world.

Donna Miscolta on stage: Signed Ana Miscolta Cameron 11/7/99.

Shin Yu: I remember that moment vividly on stage and I remember, um, yeah, the emotion coming into your voice and you are getting choked up just, it was, it was so touching and tender.

Donna Miscolta: I don't know, it felt kind of like this door opening into the past, into who this child was back then, and actually who I was back then. I think, it's hard to think thinking about who you were as a mother back then, , thinking about all the mistakes we made.

I'm just as gonna assume that all families at some point in their histories, have some level of dysfunction. And ours was no different. And a lot of it had to do with living in a house that was not really functional.

Shin Yu Narration: Ana's letter and time capsule were a portal back to a time of childhood. When the world still felt closely drawn and intimate. When home was a refuge from a world that didn't notice, let alone embrace, a young girl seeking to find her place. The time capsule cradled that moment. And those memories.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: I think we didn't really have good communication for a very long time, almost until, you know, around when Ilio was born, when my son was born.

Donna Miscolta: Now that she's raising her own child, there are things that we both see. I think it's just these stages that are necessary to go through, these difficult times. And with time and maturation on everybody's parts , we come together in a place a lot stronger than before.

Shin Yu Narration: Recovering her daughter's time capsule allowed Donna to recognize the core parts of the open-hearted, caring young girl that Ana once was and the parts of that identity that Ana had carried forward with her into adulthood. Ana sees it a little differently.

Ana Miscolta Cameron: I, I look at that letter and you know, there's a certain innocence to it and it, it's sweet on the surface, but I think what I see is something a little sadder.

Childhood and adolescence are periods of such deep insecurity. In mine I felt very insecure all the time, and I felt, I felt lonely.

Shin Yu Narration: Even if Ana's time capsule hadn't survived the demolition of her childhood home, those moments would have lived on within who she is as a vessel of memories.

Shin Yu Pai: If you were to make a time capsule today, what would you put inside of it?

Ana Miscolta Cameron: I would put inside photos, I would put inside a letter to my son, even if he's not the one to read it. I would put inside, all of these little mementos of his birth, I have a little clip of his umbilical cord that in the chaos of his birth, I just wrapped it up in plastic and then I, I just left it like that and, I would let Ilio decide because I think that children should be the ones to to put together time capsules.

Shin Yu Pai: What do you hope for Ilio when he's 10 years old?

Ana Miscolta Cameron: I hope that he has a strong sense of self and that he's kind.

I just want him to, to know that he's enough.

Shin Yu Narration: A time capsule uncovers physical relics and memories that speak to a particular moment in a personal history. But what it can also contain is the key to a younger self, a person that we may be unprepared to come face to face with again. With that surprise encounter, we get to revisit who we may have once been in more complicated times. To look back at our journey. And to gaze forward at the time we have left, and how far yet we have to voyage.