The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [88]
Downstairs, my mother had left the coffee warming, a bowl of fresh blueberries in the fridge, and a note saying where she’d gone. I ate at the counter, the blueberries firm and sweet, leafing through the latest Lake of Dreams Gazette, which featured articles on Keegan’s Glassworks—he was standing by the furnace, the glory hole he called it, with his arm tight around Max—as well as a four-page insert on the history and evolving controversy around the depot land.
The Women’s Rights National Historic Park is in Seneca Falls, just over an hour’s drive away. It’s open on Sundays, and after I washed my few dishes, I gathered up all my notes and photocopies, along with the original documents I’d found in the cupola, and set off. It seemed unlikely that they’d still have the boxes Joan Lowry had given them, or that those boxes would shed any light on Rose and her life, but I still felt optimistic as I drove through the rolling landscape and the canal towns that had prospered a hundred years ago, when Rose was young. She had perhaps been here, too, which filled me with deep excitement. Whoever she had been, whatever she had done, her story was part of the whole, and might illuminate my own.
In Seneca Falls I stopped first at the Elizabeth Cady Stanton home, where she’d lived from 1847 until 1862. A tour was just starting. The ranger took us through the simple rooms with their wide-planked floors and deep windows, which had overlooked the flats, a booming industrial area, as well as the two acres of orchards and gardens Elizabeth Cady Stanton had overseen while raising seven children. Her husband traveled with the circuit court and was often gone; she had written of how she suffered from an intellectual hunger that the busyness of her days did nothing to alleviate.
I lingered on the lawn after the tour, imagining the Stanton children scattered in play and Elizabeth striding about in her trousers and knee-length skirts. I imagined her sitting in the parlor after her guests had departed, after her children had gone to bed, writing out the Declaration of Sentiments in the long twilight evenings of early July, and then standing up to proclaim this declaration to an audience of hundreds. It must have felt exhilarating; she must have left the Wesleyan Chapel on a wave of excitement, filled with a sense of achievement and purpose. Her beliefs and her actions had opened the way for Rose two generations later, and had made my life of study and travel possible, too. But I wondered if she’d known this. It had taken seventy-two years longer for women to earn the right to vote, and not one of the speakers at the first Women’s Rights convention in 1848 had lived to see it.
In the main park building life-sized statues—of Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself, Lucretia Mott and her sister Martha Coffin Wright, the McClintocks and the Hunts and Frederick Douglass—gathered in the lobby as if arriving for the convention 158 years ago. The ranger at the front desk escorted me upstairs to meet the archivist. Her name was Gail and she was tall, with a low voice and dark, intelligent eyes. She listened with a thoughtful expression as I explained my story and asked about the boxes.
“Well, let me