More Forestville stories: Who was Minnie Lehn Winkler?

Last week, I wrote that Malcolm Melville and Mary Vargas bought the house I grew up in in 1944 from a woman named Minnie Lehn Winkler. But who was she?

She was born Minnie Stridde on May 23, 1878, in California to Carl Stridde, an immigrant from Prussia, and Marie Gustafsson, an immigrant from Sweden. How they met and married is unclear, but Minnie was probably the youngest of seven children. In the 1880 census, the family was living in Santa Rosa, where Carl was a farmer and Marie was a housekeeper. 

As a young adult, Minnie began working as a teacher in the Star school district, a couple of miles southwest of Windsor and northeast of Forestville. She was a popular teacher; at the end of the fall term in November 1899, her students gifted her a gold pen. The school had just undergone a number of significant repairs thanks to William Lehn, a 32-year-old bachelor whose father, Charles, grew grapes and made wine next door. 

Over the next couple of years, William bought several parcels of land in Forestville on the corner of Covey Road (back then called Foerster or East Street) and the county road (now Highway 116) and got to work building a winery of his own. By February 15, 1902, he’d produced enough bottles of wine — which varietal was never specified — to sell 165,000 gallons to the thirsty denizens of San Francisco. 

I can’t say for sure, but it’s very likely that William, with his new income and his building skills, raised the house on Covey Road where my family lived. Records state that the original structure was constructed sometime around 1900, with significant remodeling in 1920. 

Before Lehn’s winery arrived on the corner of Covey and 116, the site hosted a hotel for early travelers, called the Johnson Hotel for its owner, James W. Johnson. In the early 20th century, Forestville was changing constantly. Lehn successfully petitioned the county to bring telephone service to the town in 1903, and was instrumental in bringing an electric rail line to Forestville not long after, perhaps to help him ship so much wine. Johnson moved the hotel a block or so south, next to the railway, and renamed it the Electric Hotel, which freed up land for Lehn to expand his winemaking operation. 

Meanwhile, a romance was blossoming between William and Minnie, who married January 3, 1907 in Berkeley. Their only child, William Duncan Lehn, was born February 24, 1908. He was probably the first child to grow up in the house I later knew as my own. 

Left: (L-R) Minnie, William Jr., and William Lehn, probably around 1915. Right: William Jr. and Minnie sometime in the 1930s. Photos courtesy Ancestry.com.

The winery endured hardship many times, including in the 1906 earthquake. “The wine tank could not withstand the strain and burst in every direction. I lost in the two cellars about two hundred thousand gallons of wine,” he wrote to a colleague, Leopold Justi, about three weeks after the quake. 

Already, that year’s vines were dry and struggling; someone who’d offered to buy them had backed out. “I believe the best thing is to burn them for I do not believe anyone would buy them at any price.” 

Most years, though, were pretty good for William and Minnie. Newspapers eagerly reported the winery’s impressive output once or twice a year in their occasional “news from Forestville” segments. 

But in September 1915, hardship struck again when the winery caught fire, igniting in the distillery building, damaging buildings and machinery and destroying about 400,000 gallons of wine. Some of that wine, local papers reported, flowed to a nearby hog ranch, where they:

“quaffed copiously and long of the flood of vintage. They drank so much, too, that they became intoxicated so that they could do nothing else save lie down in the crimson stream. The hogs would have been drowned, too, had not the farmer and his men gone to their rescue. They had to be pulled out of the wine, and from Forestville came word Monday that they were still sleeping off their drunk.”

Sanborn map showing the Lehn winery property in Forestville in 1911. The house would have been off the map to the left/north, beyond the cultivated field.

Another misfortune was looming on the horizon. The temperance movement had been building for decades, and several other states had already outlawed the manufacture, sale and purchase of alcohol. Prohibition became law in California on January 16, 1920, wiping out William and Minnie’s livelihood. 

That May, William sold what appears to have been his last batch of wine, according to a local newspaper:

“Word of the sale of another large consignment of Sonoma county wine was told Wednesday by W. D. Wiley, well known Green Valley grape grower and orchardist. Wm. Lehn of the Forestville winery has sold 100,000 gallons of wine at fifty-five cents a gallon, following a previously announced sale of two carloads at fifty cents a gallon. This will be good news to a number of grape growers of the Forestville section, who had their grapes crushed at the Forestville winery last year, the financial return from which depended upon the sale of the wine. Mr. Wiley is one of the fortunate grape growers who disposed of his product in this way last year.”

And in late June 1920, four teens broke into the winery to steal as many bottles as they could get away with, before they were surrounded “by a posse of citizens and taken into custody” and charged with malicious mischief.

In September, William ran a help-wanted ad, seeking a man to assist with farm and ranch work. It’s possible, even likely, that this is when the property began converting to apple-growing. 

On a rainy day in March 1922, Minnie, William, and William Jr. were in a car with their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Newman of Santa Rosa, driving to San Francisco when the car hit a slippery patch of road near San Rafael and went off the road, plunging 20 feet down an embankment. 

William’s skull was fractured and he sustained internal injuries. Minnie’s leg was broken. Charles also sustained internal injuries, and his wife and William Jr. came away with cuts and bruises. 

William died of his injuries the next day. Minnie was hospitalized for months, and finally returned home August 5, 1922; she was still walking with crutches. It’s not clear who looked after William Jr. during this period. 

Love, and perhaps also necessity, led Minnie to remarry in December 1927. Her groom was Edward Winkler, who’d grown up just south of Forestville. He’d been married before, too, to Maude Newell, and they had two sons together, Orlo and Elmer. But by the late 1920s they’d divorced and Maude was living with Orlo in Oakland. After the wedding, Edward and Elmer moved in with Minnie and William Jr. in Forestville, and Edward was employed running a farm operation — possibly at the house. 

William Jr. married Margaret Chalmers when he was 29, and they moved soon afterward to Kings County, California. Minnie and Edward remained in Forestville for many more years, until Edward’s death on July 18, 1942. Minnie, then 64 and potentially still disabled from the crash, probably got tired of rattling around the big old house by herself or struggling to keep up with the farm and home maintenance, and sold the property to Malcolm and Mary in 1944. 

Minnie traveled some in her later years, including to England and Hawaii, and eventually went to live near her son in Kings County, where she died in 1970 at the age of 91. She is buried next to Edward in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Santa Rosa, while William Lehn rests in a nearby plot. William Jr. died in 1979, at age 71. He and his second wife, Evelyn are buried in Lemoore Cemetery in Kings County. 

An obituary of Minnie’s life confirms that “as a young woman she lived in Forestville at the corner of Covey and Van Keppel roads with her husband, William Lehn, and young son, William.” There’s only one other house on that corner, and it was built in 1952, too late for it to have been their home. 

Next time, I’ll get into the story of Forestville native Lydia Davis, her dad, carp farmer Levi Davis, and her husband, Thomas Linton, who sold the land to Willliam and Minnie Lehn that they built their house on. 

More Forestville stories: Malcolm, Mary, and "Mama" Carr

After my last post about Hichijiro Ito, Tomiye Mizutani and their family apple farm in Forestville, California, my dad and one of our former neighbors reminded me that our properties used to be part of a chicken farm before they were divided into smaller parcels in the 1960s for individual homeowners. 

That sparked another wave of research, and I discovered who lived in our house and ran that chicken ranch: Malcolm Melville (no idea if he’s related to Herman) and his wife, Mary Vargas. 

Malcolm and Mary purchased the land from Minnie Lehn Winkler in October 1944 (we’ll get to her in a future post!). At the time, the land was an apple ranch, according to a family history book titled “The Spilman Papers,” which makes sense, considering that much of the town was apple orchards and there was a fruit-drying operation down the street. They converted the land to a chicken farm in 1949, selling the eggs for “table use,” or home cooking, the history book says. 

On the other hand, the previous owners placed a help-wanted ad as early as 1919, saying they were looking for a husband and wife team to run a chicken farm, so it’s hard to say for sure when it converted from one to the other. 

Let’s go back to the beginning. 

Malcolm Leslie Melville was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 18, 1897, to James Melville and Nannie Spilman. He grew up in nearby Wilmette, attended New Trier Township High School and, in 1916, went to Clark College in Worcester, Mass. In 1917 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served in WWI, becoming a radioman. After the war, he worked as an assistant radioman at Pearl Harbor, then took a job in 1925 with the Associated Oil Company. They brought him to their San Francisco office, where he served as an accountant for almost 20 years. 

His first marriage was to Irene Neff of Nebraska, in 1920; their son, Malcolm Jr., was born in 1921 or 1922. The marriage was brief, and Irene and their son stayed behind in Illinois when Malcolm moved out to California, where he married Katherine Lovejoy Morgan in 1927. But they split up, too, and Malcolm married Mary Vargas on September 26, 1939. 

They were married at A'ts'ina/Inscription Rock in Morro, New Mexico, under the pines in a “simple but impressive ceremony” followed by “a supper in the Custodian’s cabin.” 

Mary was born April 29, 1901, in Brooklyn, a former town in Alameda County, California, that was later annexed to Oakland. Her parents were Joseph Vargas and Rose Victorino, both of whom were born in the Azores. Malcolm was her first husband and, as he worked as an accountant in San Francisco, she worked as a typist. They lived with Mary’s dad in San Leandro. 

It’s not clear what prompted them to leave the big city and gamble on an apple farm in Forestville, but in 1944, Malcolm was 47 and Mary was 44; maybe they felt it was time to get out of the corporate world. As the chicken business spun up and WWII ended, they hired local Japanese-Americans and trained them to raise chickens, gather eggs and handle other aspects of the business. 

One of those workers was Michiko Kameshima, who later became known as Betty Carr; she later founded Forestville’s Carr’s Drive-In with her husband Henry and, later still, Mom’s Apple Pie. She recently died, on May 19, 2026, at the age of 95. You can read her obituary here. 

Betty (Michiko) Carr with a Gravenstein apple, courtesy of the Mom’s Apple Pie Instagram page.

In the early years at least, it seems like business was good. In 1947, a local newspaper reported, “Mr. and Mrs. Melville have been remodeling their home on Covey Road, which is now considered one of the attractive homes in Forestville.”

A few years later, in April 1952, they had a scare when Malcolm was burning brush in the yard and a cinder floated up to the roof, sparking a small fire. A newspaper reported, “Very little damage was done and all was covered by insurance. Mr. Melville had the fire under control by the time the firemen arrived, but commended the boys on their speedy answer to his call. He feels that much more damage would have been done if he had not discovered the blaze in its infancy.”

Malcolm and Mary’s work with Japanese Americans led the Japanese government to invite them to the country to travel around the islands and speak to farmers about the poultry business. They went twice, in 1956 and 1962, for a few months at a time. 

It appears business took a turn for the worse in the mid-1950s; records show that Malcom and Mary remortgaged their property in 1955, 1957, 1959 and 1961. They formally retired from the chicken business in 1960 and sold the land to Katherine Murdock in 1963, when Malcolm was 66 and Mary was 63. Murdock was the one to subdivide the land, leading to a number of new homes built around theirs/ours in the 1960s and ‘70s. 

The couple retired to Medford, Oregon, where Malcom died in 1972 at 75, and Mary died in 1990 at 89. They’re buried together in Siskiyou Memorial Park. 

When we moved into the house, in early 1980, there were few signs of the former chicken farm or even the apple farm before it, aside from a dilapidated shed and a couple of Gravenstein apple trees. One side of the shed became an occasional playhouse for my brother and I and his friends, and we used the other side as a chicken coop for a while, until raccoons came for most of our hens. 

At the bottom of the garden was a concrete retaining wall and patio that extended beyond the fence and to our neighbors’ yard, where a large round basin in the concrete used to be filled with water for the chickens to drink from. It may still be there. 

I’m fascinated by the idea of “land ancestors” — people who had a relationship with a place before we did. These folks are some of my land ancestors, and I love that they had a close and agricultural connection to the place where I grew up.

Next time, I’ll write about the lives of Minnie Lehn Winkler and her first husband, William Lehn, who ran a successful winery in Forestville in the years before Prohibition. 

The apple-growing Ito family of Forestville, California

(This is NOT a bite-sized entry, apologies; it turned into something much bigger)

I’ve been researching my hometown, Forestville, for some writing I’m working on. I was looking through the California Newspaper Digital Collection (CDNC), because the Wikipedia article on the town mentions some kind of fire that took place in the early 20th Century and destroyed most of the early buildings. I didn’t definitively find any reports (though it could refer to this fire at the Lehn Winery in September of 1915 that resulted in a bunch of drunk hogs). 

But I did find something else: Information about a multigenerational Japanese family that ran an apple farm in Forestville from sometime in the 1910s until after World War II. I’d like to share what I’ve learned, because it’s a story I never learned growing up there and I really wish I had. 

Hichijiro Ito was born in Japan on May 10, 1875 (as I’m writing this, his birthday would have been yesterday). His mother’s name was Ecishi; I’m not sure what his father’s name was. His wife, Tomiye Mizutani, was also born in Japan, likely in 1881 or 1883. She most likely married Hichijiro in Japan and immigrated with him, though I was unable to find very much about her life. They had a son, Yoshinobu, who was born in Japan on October 12, 1905. 

The Ito family came to the U.S. and settled in Forestville sometime in the 1910s. They set up an apple farming operation on Covey Road near Davis Road, where El Molino High School was later built. It’s worth noting that the apples were Gravensteins, which were a popular Sonoma County crop, brought to the U.S. by the Russians who settled at Fort Ross in the early 19th Century). 

On November 7, 1923, a fire broke out on the Ito property, destroying two houses and damaging the Ito family’s apple-drying machine. The dryer had been used that day, but the boy who tended the kiln had made sure the fire was out before he left for the night. Neighbors said the fire started on the roof around 1 a.m., and a reporter suggested that a spark from the kiln became lodged in the vent and later ignited the roof. 

Most critically, one of Hichijiro and Tomiye’s sons, likely Yoshinobu, was in danger from the fire. He was asleep in their home, but an unidentified someone ran into the house and pulled him from his bed. 

The Oakland Tribune reported that the Ito dryer was located next door to the Sebastopol Apple Growers’ Union packing plant (another paper identifies it as the The Forestville Union Packing house). The fire could have spread to the packing house — and to the rest of the town —if not for “hundreds of people” who woke and came out to help fight the fire. Forestville, then and now, was an unincorporated part of Sonoma County and didn’t have its own (volunteer) fire department until 1938, so neighbors had to rely on each other when fires broke out. 

Aside from the apple dryer and two homes, the fire consumed 20 tons of green apples and eight and a half tons of dried apples. Newspapers reported that the fire caused about $5,000 in damage (almost $100,000 in today’s dollars), $3,800 of which was covered by insurance. 

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported that, after the fire, Hichijiro “is ready to rebuild, providing the residents do not object. The residents will no doubt object, as the drier was located near the heart of the town, which was in immediate danger, due to the inadequate fire fighting apparatus.”

I can’t help but wonder if that was the only reason neighbors might have objected. Although World War II was almost two decades away, anti-Japanese and anti-Asian sentiment was well entrenched across California.

Still, it appears the Itos rebuilt their operation. In July 1931, Hichijiro and his son Yoshinobu certified themselves as co-owners of a “retail green and dried fruit business under the name of H. Ito and Son” in Forestville. 

Circa 1930 Gravenstein Apple Show display of an huge apple, made of apples for the town of Forestville exhibit. Photo by William S. Borba.

Another member of the Ito family appears in the 1930 census, a boy named Kazuo, born December 8, 1922 and identified as Hichijiro’s grandson. Hichijiro and Tomiye had another son before Yoshinobu, but I have not been able to find much information on who he was. (He’s identified in this interview by the American name Frank, and in Kazuo’s obituary as Yoshimatsu.)

In mid-January 1932, Yoshinobu Ito, then 26, and Tsugive Hatanaka, 18, of Oakland, took out a marriage license. They were formally married on January 21, 1932, likely on the Ito property in Forestville.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported: 

Elaborate Japanese Wedding Is Performed at Forestville

FORESTVILLE, Jan. 21. An elaborate Japanese wedding took place here Sunday, uniting Tsugiye Hatanaka and Johnnie Y. Ito in marriage. All members of the bridal party and the minister were Japanese. The Rev. T. Friljii of the Sebastopol Japanese Methodist church performed the ceremony. Following the wedding, 200 guests were entertained at a bridal dinner with K. Akutagawa as master of ceremonies. Talks were given in both American and Japanese. The bride is a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Hatanaka of Oakland. She was dressed in a white satin gown with a beautiful lace veil. The veil was held in place by a cap of lace and pearls. The bride was attended by the following bridesmaids and flower girls: Miss Jlatanaka, Miss Xishioka, Miss Kobuka, Miss Takemoto. Miss Ikeda, Miss Akiya and one of her younger sisters. Ro was supported by cousin, Tommy Ito. The groom is the youngest son of Mr. and Mrs. H. Ito and attended schools here. He is associated with his father in fruit growing and packing. The couple left Sunday night for a honeymoon trip to Los Angeles and other parts of southern California.

Yoshinobu and Tsugiye had two sons, Hiromu, born in May 1934, and Akira, born in May 1939. 

On July 2, 1940, the Oakland Tribune ran an article about a rivalry between apple growers from Sonoma County: 

Two produce firms this morning reported the receipt of Gravenstein apples, the first to be received in Oakland for the current season. Jack Oliver, of W. A. Rouse & Company, received a shipment from H. Ito, rancher of Forestville, Sonoma County. Ito usually "beats" his competitors. This year, however, V. Sangiacomo, of Sonoma, shipped to Angeli Brothers on the same day They were put on display by Joe Cellini of that firm. The fruit was quoted for from $1.85 to $2 per lug.

Kazuo graduated from Analy High School in Sebastopol in 1940. After World War II began, at 19 and a U.S. Citizen, he registered for the U.S. Draft. His registration card lists him as five feet two and a half inches tall and 144 pounds, with brown hair and a ruddy complexion. He reported that he was “working for parents” and gave an address of P.O. Box 84 in Forestville. He also listed the Merced Assembly Center in Merced, California as an address, but crossed it out. 

The Merced Assembly Center was a temporary internment camp for Japanese Americans that operated for about five months between May and September of 1942 before prisoners were sent elsewhere. The U.S. kept Kazuo along with the rest of his family in Merced before sending them on to “Camp Amache” or the Granada War Relocation Center in Granada, Colorado, hundreds of miles from Forestville. 

They were registered in Granada on September 9, 1942. Hichijiro was 67 and Tomiye was around 60. The little boys, Hiromu and Akira, were 8 and 3. 

A friend of the family, Tom Perry, said in a 2003 interview that his parents took care of the Ito ranch while the family was imprisoned. He grew up playing with one of the Ito kids, whom he identifies as Keith (probably Hiromu). Perry said: 

Anyway, I know that Johnny (Yoshinobu) ran the dryer and he and Sue (Tsugiye) lived on our ranch there for a while before the war and before they bought a place on Hurlbut Avenue (in Sebastopol). Their sons were Steve and Keith, who was just a few months younger than me, and Keith was my first playmate. I have a number of pictures where we were toddlers together. And Keith and I went all through school together, through grammar school, high school. I was four years old when the war began, so I don’t remember much of what was going on. I remember my mom talking about them being back in the camps. I knew about camping, that sounded like fun. So that was how much I knew back in those days when the war started and the internment situation took place. 

While most of the Ito family were in Colorado, Hichijiro was accused of criminal espionage and shuffled around the country.

Tom Perry recalled: 

So Grandpa disappeared. [He] was accused of being a spy. He was sent first to Louisiana, then to New Mexico. He was accused of having maps in his place. Maps! If you have maps in your house you’re obviously suspicious, and he was accused of having $40,000 sewn into his clothing. $40,000 in those days would be about a million today. Not too likely, but this was the story. Supposedly he was convicted. So he wasn’t able to join his family until 1944, when he joined the rest of the family in Amache. I’m not sure whether he was acquitted later. It was rumored this was the case, but for sure he was put away for some time for “committing the crime.”

Perry’s mom, Lea Perry, wrote letters back and forth with Kazuo while he was in Merced and later Granada, discussing and coordinating operations of the Ito ranch in Forestville from 1942 until they were released in 1945. Incredibly, all of these letters were donated and digitized, and are available to read online in Sonoma State University’s digital collection. The Itos apparently sent the Perrys small amounts of money in thanks for running the ranch in their absence, and at least once, Lea told them she could not accept the money, knowing they were receiving so little in the camp. 

Lea also sent them gifts. Tomiye in particular loved persimmons, and Lea would send some on occasion. Tom Perry recalls: 

In fact, I can still remember as a five year old, the persimmon tree. I didn’t know what they were so I bit into one one day, and (laughs) thought, this is not to eat. When they got ripe, Grandma Ito liked persimmons, so my mom would send them to her. Also apples and dried fruit. Of course, it was really appreciated. I remember one of the letters told about when they were in Merced, she shipped down a box of apples and Kaz said, “I grew up with these apples. We would even throw them from time to time, as kids, like baseballs.” He said, “I never realized how good they are and what a treat it was to have them.”

The Itos were released from detention on September 26, 1945 and most, if not all, returned to Forestville and Sebastopol.

It helped that the Perry family had been taking good care of their ranch and their houses in both towns. Tom also thought that the Itos had perhaps faced less racism in Sonoma County than Japanese people had in other parts of the country, possibly because they had been established in the area so long before the war. “I think that there were enough people here who knew the Japanese and what good people they were,” Perry said. “Also, people like my folks who took care of ranches, made people feel that their home was here, and that their places were here and they were cared for.”

Enmanji Buddhist Temple in Sebastopol, California.

Perry also mentioned that Hichijiro was involved in establishing the Enmanji Buddhist Temple in Sebastopol. Before the temple, a Buddhist Sunday school and Japanese language school launched in 1926, and in 1928 a minister from the Buddhist Mission of North America visited the area to begin missionary work. Japanese Sonoma County residents met in 1932 to talk about establishing their own temple, and purchased a house in Sebastopol, opening the first temple space in 1933. Its first minister was Rev. Shodo Goto.

The current building, however, has an even more amazing story: It was constructed by workers with the Manchurian Railroad Company and used as part of their exhibit hall at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933. After the fair, the company donated the building to the Buddhist Mission of North America, which in turn offered it to the Sonoma County folks. It was dismantled in Chicago and transported by rail to Sebastopol, where it was rebuilt — without the use of nails — in early 1934. 

Difficult news continued to follow the Ito family after the war. On June 30, 1949, a newspaper reported that “The friends of Kazuo Ito will be sorry to hear that he is confined in Oak Knoll hospital. He would appreciate hearing from different ones.” And in early November 1950, Hichijiro was released from Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol after undergoing two weeks of treatment for burns. 

More cheerfully, Hichijiro was featured in a 1953 Press Democrat article about a group of 76 local Japanese Americans finishing a citizenship class so they could become naturalized in the U.S. Such classes were made possible by the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which made it easier for Asians to immigrate to the U.S., and for those already in the U.S. to become citizens. Among his classmates, Hichijiro was the oldest, at 78. 

Yoshinobu became a citizen in November 1954.

Kazuo was the first of the Forestville Ito clan to die, on May 5, 1955, at age 32. The Enmanji Temple hosted his wake, and his ashes were committed at Chapel of the Chimes in Santa Rosa, according to the Press Democrat. 

Hichijiro followed a few years later, in February 1958, at the age of 83. Like Kazuo, his wake services took place at Enmanji and his ashes were committed at Chapel of the Chimes. The Press Democrat reported: “Mr. Ito died Wednesday in a Santa Rosa hospital. He lived in Forestville 45 years after coming from Japan. He was an apple rancher on Covey Rd. He is survived by his wife, Tomie Ito, Forestville; sons, Yoshinatsu Ito, Sacramento, Yoshinobu Ito and Tom Ito, both of Sebastopol, and eight grandchildren.”

Yoshinobu died February 10, 1994 at the age of 88. Enmanji hosted his wake, and his ashes were inurned at Pleasant Hill Cemetery (now Pleasant Hills Memorial Park) in Sebastopol. The Press Democrat reported: “A native of Japan, he came to Forestville in 1920 to join his father in running an apple dryer and apple orchard. He was a member of the Enmanji Buddhist Church and the Japanese American Citizens League. Survivors include his wife, Tsugiye Ho of Sebastopol; his children, Steven Ito of Sacramento, Keith Ito of Concord, Philip Ito of Santa Rosa, Mildred Milne, Ft. Bragg and Katharine Legro of Calistoga; seven grandchildren and one great granddaughter.” 

Tsugiye died in May 2022, and is also inurned at Pleasant Hill. 

I regret that there are so many gaps in this account — I wasn’t able to find much information on Yoshinatsu or Tom Ito, or follow the lives of Hiromu or Akira, or locate details on the women of these families, especially Tomiye and Tsugiye. There is a much deeper story here to be told of the Ito family in Sonoma County, and Japanese American apple growers and farmers more generally. But I hope this will make it easier for family members and researchers in the future. 

It all started with a kitten

Two kittens, actually. 

One day last summer, I looked out the windows into our backyard, and noticed a kitten standing on the low cement wall that separates our patio from our garden. 

Seeing cats in the backyard isn't unusual; we have bird feeders and squirrels and catnip and other things that neighborhood cats like to drop by and enjoy, but this was the first time seeing a kitten visitor. 

I went outside to take a closer look, worried that the kitten might be on its own. A moment later, its Mom, a pearly gray tabby that I’d seen before, emerged and hissed at me for getting too close to her baby. I backed off and went inside, thinking that would be the end of it. 

I have a security camera set up in the backyard specifically to track the comings and goings of various critters, including cats, skunks, possums, raccoons, squirrels, and other rodents. Not long after the daytime kitten visit, the camera picked up Mama Cat showing her kitten around the garden late one night and urging it along with little trills, which female cats make in order to communicate with their children. After that nighttime capture, we didn't see the kitten again, although the mom cat continued her regular visits. 

At this point I was under the naive impression that both Mom and kitten were living in a household with humans. But in December, during a rainstorm, I was laying down to sleep one night when I heard repeated meows coming from the backyard. 

Eventually, I got dressed, grabbed a flashlight and went outside, only to find a tiny black kitten huddled up on top of one of our fences, desperately calling out for its mom. 

D. came out to help and managed to get the kitten down, and we heard its Mom calling to it on the other side of the fence. He tried to put the kitten somewhere where the mom would find it again, and we all went to bed, thinking that would be the end of it. 

Mama cat, drinking from a bucket on our patio. That wound on her nose has since healed well.

The next day, though, we could still hear the kitten calling for its mom. It was two houses over from ours, and it seemed clear that Mom was not going to be able to get it back to wherever they were living. 

I went door to door to see whose backyard the kitten wound up in. Normally in San Francisco, we're pretty wary of strangers coming to our doors, but when there's a kitten involved, suddenly everyone becomes very friendly and curious and helpful.

The kitten was hiding beneath a deck in a neighbor's yard. It took a while, but with the help of some tinned fish from the neighbor, we lured it out and D. grabbed it and put it in a cat carrier. I called Animal Care and Control since it was a Sunday and the SFSPCA was not open, and ACC took it in. They discovered that the kitten was a boy, and estimated that he was about 9 weeks old. 

A couple of days later, he was taken in by a volunteer who fosters kittens. I don't know what happened after that, but I hope and assume that he was adopted by a family that is loving him very much. 

By this point, it was becoming clear that both the kitten and his mom were strays, probably living in a corner of somebody's backyard or corner of the garage that nobody checks all that often. I reached out to the SPCA to have them put me in touch with volunteers who help take care of stray cat communities. 

One important aspect of this work is called TNR, for trap-neuter-release. The idea is that you trap a stray or feral cat, neuter it to keep it from adding to the feral population, and then release it back into the community. The conventional wisdom is that when you remove a cat from an existing cat colony, another one will move in — and it also may need sterilization, so it's better to return an already established cat back into the same community. 

The volunteer helped set me up with a trap and a process of luring the mom cat back to the yard regularly so that we could trap and neuter her. She turned out to be quite easy to lure, putting regular food out day and night and then putting it deeper and deeper into the trap so that she would become comfortable. We trapped her within a week or two. 

Bob.

One interesting wrinkle is that she was occasionally bringing another cat that we'd seen before, a large tabby tomcat with a surgically shortened tail that a neighbor of mine decided to name Bob because of his bobtail. Bob was there the night that we got the mom cat in the trap. He came back at least once that night to check on her before she could be picked up the next morning. In retrospect, he’s probably her mate, and the father of the black kitten on the fence and the gray kitten we'd seen the previous summer. 

Once the mom cat got neutered and was staying with humans, it became quite clear that she had been domesticated before. She was really friendly with everyone who took care of her. So the original plan to release her back into our neighborhood was abandoned in favor of trying to find her a forever home, and she wound up being adopted by a neighbor of the volunteer who had helped me trap her. 

She now lives in their household, and is friends with their golden retriever, though she is clearly the head of the household at this point.

Meanwhile, we tried for weeks to lure Bob around often enough that we could get him in a trap, since he's probably responsible for at least two litters of kittens, but he doesn’t come around often enough to get into the habit of eating kibble in our yard. 

More recently, I've spied glimpses of a mature kitten, not quite a year old, with the same coloring as the mom cat. She is probably the gray kitten that I first saw through the window last summer. We've had little luck trapping her, either, especially since one of our friendly neighbor cats who likes to hang out and hunt in the garden got into a massive fight with her and chased her away. 

We still see Bob occasionally, but we haven't seen the daughter since that fight. If either begins coming around more often, we’ll try again.

Have you ever had stray or feral cats visit your yard? Did you ever trap/rescue any? Or make friends with them? 

Four Cemeteries on my ‘Bucket List’

As Halloween and Samhain draw near, I’m thinking a lot about the cemeteries I’d like to visit. All of them are places where my ancestors are buried; I’ve also got a long mental list of “destination” cemeteries where nobody I know is buried. Maybe that’s a post for another day.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, New York

One of my ancestral lines that I’ve been able to trace back quite far is the Storm family, who lived in the Netherlands for many generations before Dirck Goris Storm (1630-1716), my 10th great-grandfather, immigrated to the U.S. in 1662. He eventually wound up in a new, small town called North Tarrytown on the eastern banks of the Hudson River, and later wrote the history of the Old Dutch Church in North Tarrytown. A man after my own heart.

I wrote a longer post about him in 2020, but he died long before Washington Irving came to visit and made the town famous. It later officially changed its name to Sleepy Hollow and the old cemetery (pictured above), where many Storms are buried, has become a tourist attraction. I recently learned, thanks to my friend Loren Rhoads, that the Ramones filmed their video for “Pet Sematary” here, too. 

White House family graveyard, Virginia

The White House in Luray, Virginia. Photo courtesy the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

Another cluster of my ancestors were Mennonites who immigrated to the U.S. from Switzerland in the early 1700s, settled in Pennsylvania for a couple of generations, and then established a community in the Shenandoah Valley in a place now called Luray. My fifth great-grandfather, Martin Kauffman, Jr., built a meetinghouse called the White House that still stands today.  

A small family graveyard was established next to the White House, where several of my ancestors and their families were buried. I recognize so many names on the gravestones: Brubaker, Roads, Albright, Strickler and Martin himself, along with his father, Martin Kauffman Sr. 

Downpatrick Second Presbyterian Church, Northern Ireland

My second great-grandfather, James Corry Nesbitt, came to the U.S. in 1866 (three of his brothers also immigrated within about a decade of each other). But the rest of his family remained in Northern Ireland, particularly in and around a small region called Tyrella. 

There’s a memorial stone to these ancestors in the churchyard of the Second Presbyterian Church in Downpatrick, including James’ parents, William Nesbitt and Margaret Corry; his siblings, George, Alexander and Robert, and his grandparents, Robert Nesbitt and Jane Cochrane. There are markers for 24 Nesbitts here, and I’m probably in some way related to all of them. James Corry Nesbitt, his wife, Elizabeth Woollard and their kids are buried in Green Lawn Cemetery in Franklin County, Ohio; another stop on my wishlist.

Old Roswell Cemetery, Georgia

My second great-grandfather, Zachary (or Zachariah) Taylor Jones, Sr., was a significant patriarch on my mom’s side. He was the second-oldest of 10 children, born in 1849 in Roswell, Georgia, where he lived his entire life. He worked as a farmer and also served as the town constable. He married three times and fathered a total of 19 children. 

He’s buried in the Old Roswell Cemetery, along with all three of those wives (Mamie Hunnicutt, Alice Bruce, and my second great-grandmother, Lucretia “Cressy” Perkins) and most or all of his children, including my great-grandfather, Bartow Jones. I’m especially grateful to the Roswell Historical Society’s Cemetery Project, which is restoring and replacing grave markers with the help of donations. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick virtual tour. What cemeteries — ancestral or otherwise — would you like to visit?

Míle Buíochas, a Chara: Manchán Magan

I was devastated to learn last night that Irish writer and broadcaster Manchán Magan died on Oct. 2. It seems impossible; he was only 55, and had so many plans ahead of him. 

I first encountered Magan’s work around 2020, when I began learning the Irish language on Duolingo (not the best platform for it, but that’s a conversation for another time). He was a vigorous spokesman for the Irish language, and for bringing it back in a way that went far beyond the rote learning students get in Irish schools, making it enchanting again.

A little background: Irish developed from the language the Celts brought to the island when they settled it sometime between 2400 and 2000 BC. It has been in use ever since, and was the primary language of Ireland until the English began colonizing the country. Speaking Irish in public became illegal, and all schooling, government communication and legal affairs were conducted strictly in English.

British rule was less absolute in portions of Ireland, particularly the far-Western areas, and the Irish language survived here, in places collectively known as the Gaeltacht. Those regions have continued to shrink over the decades. 

In 2003, the Irish government signed the Official Languages Act (Acht na dTeangacha Oifigiúla), reclaiming Irish as an official language of the island. 

Four years later, Magan traveled around Ireland, testing how far he could get speaking Irish, and recorded the results for a four-part series called “No Béarla” (“No English”). 

I watched the series shortly after I began my studies, and was both amused and horrified by moments like the one in which Magan tries to buy condoms in a drugstore, or when he sings bawdy songs in the streets of Galway to see if anyone understands just how filthy he’s being (mostly, no). 

I began following Magan’s work online at that point, and discovered he was working on a wealth of projects that tie Irish language, culture, folklore and landscape together in ways that resonate with me deeply. 

Off and on for years he hosted the Almanac of Ireland, a Radio Telefis Éireann podcast that considered bogs, sacred wells and Irish foods as well as numerous artists, mythologers and elder storytellers.

He gathered forgotten words from Ireland’s fishing communities and shared them in a project he called “Sea Tamagotchi.”  (For example, the word for the “sucking of the ocean at the shore during large tides of spring and autumn [that is] particularly noticeable at night” is suaitiú.)

In the fall of 2020, he released “Thirty-Two Words for Field,” which focuses on how Ireland’s language and landscapes are tightly interwoven. I devoured this book when it finally arrived in the U.S., and it remains one of my favorite books of all time.

He’s released a few wonderful picture books, including “Tree Dogs, Banshee Fingers and Other Irish Words for Nature” in 2021 and “Wolf-Men and Water Hounds: The Myths, Monsters and Magic of Ireland” in 2023. (Did you know that the Irish call jellyfish smugairle rón — literally, seal snot?)

In 2022 came “Listen to the Land Speak,” in which Magan takes the reader on a journey across Ireland, investigating ancient place-names and the myths they reference. In particular, he talks about the rivers of Ireland as goddesses, places where visitors can communicate with the divine (or be disappeared into another world, if they aren’t careful). 

Unlike many other men of his (or really any) generation, Magan celebrated the feminine in language, landscape and mythology. 

“We fell head over heels for this man who taught us the vaginal nature of the sacred passages all over Ireland, and how much worship we must bring with us into the womb of the Earth. I will never forget the relish with which he spoke of women’s divinity, and the sparkle in his eye when he spoke of love,” writer and activist adrienne maree brown wrote on Instagram this morning. 

I recently acquired Magan’s book “Focail na mBan” (“Women’s Words”), a collection of Irish words for vaginas, vulvas, clitorises and periods that he collected over the years, to give Irish women back the language around these parts of our bodies. I haven’t yet read it, but will likely savor it this weekend while thanking this writer for all he offered. 

Magan was diagnosed with prostate cancer a couple of years ago, and he revealed in September that it had metastasized to just about every part of his body. He thought he might have a year or two more, or at least a few more months. It turned out he only had weeks. 

Cancer is a real bastard. Especially this year, somehow. 

Katie Greenwood Ross — who created music and art under the name Thistle Thistle — died in May of breast cancer. She was only 34, and such an amazing bright light in the world. Before her death, she wrote, “I feel very fulfilled. I feel like I did great stuff with my life. I feel like I was a very prolific guy. And I feel proud of myself and what I have done.” 

And then went the incredible poet and empathy-generator Andrea Gibson, who died of ovarian cancer in July. Their writing taught readers how to open their hearts, to soften, to find wonder and awe in the everyday. Just before they died, they said, “I fucking LOVED my life.”

And now Manchán Magan. I am so grateful to have lived at the same time as him, Andrea and Katie.

In a recent interview, Magan said he wasn’t afraid of death. After death, he predicted, "[I will] remember all that other life I've been, all that being I've been for thousands of years beyond the physical body, the times that I wasn't in the physical body. And I'd say pretty soon again, I'll probably come into another body to continue this work.”

Where I've Been and Where I'll Be

I know it’s been ages since I’ve updated here. Frankly, my mind was a little fried after finishing the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum names project, which got a nice writeup from KQED’s Rae Alexandra.

May was hectic and, in the midst of it, Courtney Minick (Here Lies A Story) and I began recording episodes of our new podcast, Dead Reckoning (“where death isn’t the end of the story!”). Court and I became friends while I was writing “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries,” because we’re both fascinated and nerdy about the same stuff, and we love talking to each other about it. You’ll see as you listen to the first three episodes:

1. “Yerba Buena Cemetery: Everyone had broken noses”

2. “Fort Mason Burial Pit: The world’s worst layer cake”

3. “The History of Medical Cadavers: Never enough bodies”

Please listen — I really hope you enjoy these conversations as much as we enjoyed having them. More are on the way, too, so subscribe if you like what you hear.

This spring, an older poem of mine, “False Clover,” was published in a UK collection called “Ten Poems About Weeds” (order here). And in June, I had a new poem, “Red Deer,” published in Nonbinary Review (order here). I’ve been writing a lot of poetry this year and I’m excited to share more as it comes out.

Even though I was a bit done with the Magdalen Asylum for a while, it wasn’t done with me. In August, FoundSF (a great resource for locals interested in our history) published a piece I wrote about my efforts to determine whether our laundry hid a mass grave like some of those in Ireland did. You can read it here.

This month, I have a short story, “I Would Breathe Water,” in the Limbo issue of Club Chicxulub. It’s a modern retelling of Scottish/Orcadian selkie folklore. I rarely write fiction, so it’s a real treat to share this story (written in 2022, I think) with you.

Also, this month and next, I will be appearing at a few events, online and in person. Here are the details:

Friday, Sept. 19, 11 a.m. Pacific: “Dying in the Margins: A Closer Look at Funeral Poverty” (online) with Beth Winegarner, Amy Shea and Evie King, hosted by The Order of the Good Death. Join us for a powerful conversation on funeral poverty and the stark inequalities that shape how we die and how we’re remembered. Register here and go deeper here (PDF).

Thursday, Oct. 16, 6 p.m.: “A Book Tour of Cemeteries.” Beth WInegarner, Amy Shea and Loren Rhoads will read excerpts from their work on death and cemeteries and hold a lively conversation about respect for the dead and the importance of memorialization. In person at the San Francisco Columbarium, 1 Loraine Court, San Francisco. Register here.

Saturday, Oct. 25, Lit Crawl (time and location TBD): “Campfire Stories and Other Ghostly Narratives.” Beth will read at Lit Crawl, the final event in San Francisco’s annual Litquake, along with fellow writers Rowena Leong Singer, Sezin Devi Koehler, Doug Henderson, Jennifer Christgau and Jenny Qi. Keep an eye on my Instagram feed for details.

Consciousness, memory, retrograde

If you’re not interested in astrology, bear with me for a minute.

Astrologically speaking, Mercury is currently retrograde. This means that from our vantage, it appears to be moving backward through the skies. Mercury is the planet of communication and technology, and during these phases, astrologers advise double-checking your emails and travel plans, and being more conscious of how you speak to others and how you listen to and read others’ words. 

Mercury went retrograde on March 15. Three days in, the morning of March 18, my mobile phone started rebooting itself over and over. It was a Pixel 6a, a few years old, and many of my past Android devices have kicked off their death processes with the dreaded boot loop, so I began making plans for its demise. 

I was born with Mercury in retrograde, and I sometimes have this internal debate over whether this makes Mercury-retrograde periods easier on me than on others (with the occasional minor crisis, like this one), or if it just puts me in some kind of perpetual, low-grade communication/technology miasma. The jury’s still out, but I did manage to hardlock my laptop by connecting a game controller a day or two after my phone started glitching.

D. managed to get my 6a out of the loop by putting it in airplane mode, but that evening, while we were trying to manually back up my photos, its touchscreen began reacting erratically and, while we were both in another room, my phone spontaneously blared an alarm and called 911. 

My phone was literally calling for help! All the same, I’m grateful the local dispatchers didn’t send an ambulance to the house. 

I ordered a new phone the next morning. While I waited for it to arrive, I thought a bit about phones as conscious beings; the hardware as the body, and the software, apps and all of our personal touches as the soul. I’m someone who strives toward animism, the idea that everything — plants, stones, clothes, coffee mugs — has a soul, or some kind of independent consciousness. I often imagine, for example, what the pebbles and gravel in our roads and freeways think about; how they feel about their current circumstances, and what they remember about their lives before they were turned into pavement. 

Our phones are made of so many disparate materials. In mine, the aluminum housing is made from recycled aluminum, but the original ore is mined in Eurasia. The glass screen is made of sand, soda ash and limestone, abundant materials that have been with us for millennia, if not predating humans entirely. The silicon in the chips is forged from sand and quartz. 

And then there are the rarer ingredients. Indium gives touchscreens their ability to respond to your fingertips; tantalum prevents internal components from corroding; yttrium and others make phone screens more vibrant and luminescent. The batteries run on lithium and cobalt, while other components glitter with gold, silver, platinum and palladium. 

What is the consciousness in each of these components? What souls do they carry?

Over the weekend, I heard a talk by New Zealand artist and author Charlotte Rogers, whose animism embraces the idea that objects contain not only consciousness, but memory. I brought up the disparate elements in mobile phones, and she remarked on the fact that many of those elements are mined unethically, without respect for the earth or the miners, some of whom are children. She asked: If these components have the capacity to remember, what do they remember about the process of being extracted in this way, and what does it mean for us to hold such an object in our hands, or press it to our ears? 

Look, even if you don’t believe in animism, it’s an interesting mental exercise. Give it a try.

When my new phone arrived, I was able to copy everything from the 6a onto it, connected by a USB cable like an umbilical cord or blood transfusion, soul moving into a new body. I factory-reset the 6a and sent it back to Google to be refurbished and, perhaps, reincarnated with a new buyer. I hope whatever frightened it — whatever caused it to reboot, glitch, and call for help — is over now. 

Corseted scapulae and dead butt syndrome

Ever since I was a teen, people have been telling me to fix my posture, particularly chiropractors and physical therapists. Just sit straighter. Picture a string attached to your sternum, lifting it up. Pull your shoulders back. But it always hurt so much to try.

My new physical therapist has a better explanation: The muscles at the front of my shoulders and across my chest are strong and short, while the ones in my upper back are long, floppy and weak. The solution? Work those trapezius muscles, named for the geometric shape they make on our shoulders and backs, and they will strengthen and shorten. 

The distance between each shoulder blade and the spine should only be a couple of inches, she says. My gap is much wider than that. I am tempted to punch grommets along the inner line of my shoulder blades and lace them together across my back, like a corset. 

Humans work those muscles by reaching overhead for things, something we don’t do as often these days. I imagine our ancestors picking fruit from trees, layering hides over wooden frames for shelter. But I also point out that, at 5 foot 2, I still have to do a lot of reaching, even to gather food off the shelves in the grocery store or my kitchen. She concedes the point, but still urges me to do the exercises.

She also tells me that I have a tendency to lean back when I stand or walk. It’s no wonder it hurts to pull my shoulders back further or puff my chest out. My whole torso needs to move forward, not further back. 

It’s similar with my hips, which have been hurting for years. The muscles at the front of my hips, particularly the tiny tensor fascia lata and the larger rectus femoris, have been doing all the work of stabilizing my hips (and body!) while my glutes do fuck-all. 

She tells me about “gluteal amnesia,” AKA “dead butt syndrome,” in which our important booty muscles have forgotten that they have a job. It’s a major cause of gluteus medius tendinopathy, which I definitely have and which has been the source of much of my hip pain. 

As I try the exercises she gives me to wake my butt back up, I find that my glutes really have forgotten. When I try to use them, the tensor fasciae latae say, “here, let us do that,” and then they hurt because they’re already doing too much. It’s a bit of mental gymnastics to use the sleepy muscles while quieting the overachievers. 

It reminds me of those group projects in school, in which one or two people do all the work while the slackers claim their share of the credit. 

All of this is a byproduct of a life spent sitting at computers and on sofas, curled up like a prawn, hunched into a defensive posture. And in the world we live in, who can blame me? I think of my therapist, encouraging me to stand with my arms on my hips like Wonder Woman or spread in a tall V, like a champion. It always felt silly but she assures me that such postures make us feel more powerful and confident. 

I’m firmly middle-aged. It feels like my muscles and connective tissues are turning into jerky and my body is screaming for estrogen (did you know that the joints in our bodies have estrogen receptors?) It feels good to find a physical therapist who understands bodies in a more holistic way. As much as I resent doing daily physical therapy exercises, I’m hopeful that this process will help my butt and upper back lose their amnesia before it’s too late. 

Communing With the Dead

Patrick Wolf, one of my favorite musicians, recently released a new single, “Dies Irae,” that imagines what he and his family could have done together to celebrate their connections in the days before his mother died of cancer. She was a painter, and he asks her to “show me your unfinished painting; What bird here were you intending?” Later he suggests she go dance with his father in the kitchen: “You’ve been his religion and his joy … it’s later than he thinks.”

My own mom died when I was 22, 29 years ago in January, and I didn’t really get to say goodbye to her. My spring semester at UC Berkeley had started a week before her death, so I’d said goodbye to her in the hospital, but it was a casual “see-you-soon” hug and farewell, not the proper goodbye I wish I’d had. 

Wolf’s new song has me imagining what I’d want to include in a “last good day” with my mom. Granted, I’m much older now and the things I think I’d want aren’t necessarily the things my 22-year-old self would have enjoyed, but I think I can find some common ground with my younger self here.

Some ideas: 

• Listen to music together, maybe the Traveling Wilburys or Pink Floyd or Twisted Sister (yes, she was into all of them). 

• Eat some ice cream

• Tell bad puns and stupid jokes and laugh

• Sew together, quilting or embroidery or something along those lines

• Go through family photo albums and see if she’d tell me stories

• Ask her to tell some favorite memories from my childhood

• Hug a lot

Last week, I went back to UC Berkeley to visit the library and watch a DVD that they have in their collection, a short documentary, “Shellmound,” made by UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Alum Andres Cediel. I haven’t been on campus in years and going back there is like digging back through everything I went through in my brief two years at the school, including my mom’s death. 

“Shellmound” is about another kind of digging: The construction of the Bay Street Mall in Emeryville, on the site of a massive Ohlone shellmound, a burial ground for thousands of indigenous people who lived in the East Bay before European settlers arrived. I knew about the burial ground when D. and I lived in Oakland in 2001 and 2002, and the documentary makes it clear that hundreds, if not thousands, of indigenous people are still buried beneath the shopping center. I may write or talk more about the documentary at another time, but I encourage everyone to watch the trailer here. 

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As I emerged from the basement at Doe Library where I watched the film, I encountered displays of experimental books, including one by artist Stephanie Gibbs entitled “Amissa Anima: A Book of the Dead.” According to the text accompanying the display: 

Stephanie Gibbs, Amissa Anima: A Book of the Dead (Los Angeles Stephanie Gibbs, 2016), printed paper, glass bottles, and mixed materials in cloth-bound box, N7433-4.6447 A83 2016, Art History Classics Library, University of California, Berkeley.

An artist's book is an experience. Here, Gibbs has created a kit to commune with the dead, featuring items ranging from historical photographs to a candle and Ouija board. The kit also includes bottled emotions. "Hope (kindling of)," for example, is represented by a matchstick. Gibbs imagines her audience not as viewers but as participants. This work also demonstrates how ephemeral artists' books can be. Items such as the candle will be consumed when put to use. The collector must make a choice: engage in the full experience intended by the artist and use up some of the artist's creation, or imagine the experience and keep the creation pristine.

Following my experience with the documentary, and appearing among these recent thoughts of death and mothers, this display felt as though it were speaking to me directly. Just like this artists’ book, life is so ephemeral. You can engage in the full experience, or you can try to keep it protected under glass. It won’t last either way you approach it, but one path will leave you with fewer regrets and resentments (shards).