An unsuspecting Dianne McLeod and her husband were tearing apart the drywall during renovations of their early 1900s, Queen Ann Revival house at Queenston Road, Preston, Cambridge, Ontario when McLeod came across a Ball Mason jar with a note, some money, and more trinkets.
“You know, old houses typically go through renovations,” McLeod, who works at the local food bank, begins retelling. “We were opening up the walls, then the ceiling, and that’s when we found the time capsule.”
Three decades before, Prestonian Ann Taylor, her then partner, Sue Grasely, and two friends, Theresa Morrison, Charlie Szender, had a renovation party, and decided to hide a bottle with memorabilia from their time, 1992, at the Queenston address. For Taylor, renovating this house was meaningful.
Just a year prior, she had taken a leap of faith and quit her job at the factory. “I thought, this is not what I want to do with the rest of my life,” Taylor recalls.
“I went back to school and they put us through this little program to figure out what we’d be good at,” Taylor says. One of the courses she took was woodworking.
“I had never touched a tool in my life,” Taylor notes. But in woodworking, it was like a lightbulb went off. “I thought it was a lot of fun and I just carried on from that,” Taylor says of the meaningful transition.
Woodworking has often been male dominated. Woodworking magazine reports that 94 to 96 percent of people working with tools in the woodworking shop environment are men.
But this didn’t faze Taylor. “As soon as I got to school, someone hired me to start framing houses, and I even got some backlash from some of the guys because they didn’t think I could do it,” Taylor remembers.
“When they did actually see what I could do, they were impressed. Not patting myself in the back, but I was pretty good,” says a proud Taylor, who had her own business until the housing industry went down in the early 2000s.
The making of a Preston time capsule
“I had a business of my own doing custom trimming for brand new homes. So I thought it would be a fun little project to do some of the renovations around the house,” says Taylor of the beams she put together on the ceiling, and the shed, which according to McLeod was copied by the neighbours because they liked the design so much.
“Sue and I owned the house, and Charlie and Theresa were there constantly on weekends, hanging out. So when I was doing the beams, we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be a fun idea if we put something in there just from this year?’,” Taylor recollects.
And just like that, they took out a mason jar, and began filling the Preston time capsule with,
a note prefacing their love for the house (“Just wanted you all to know that we love living here and we do”),
a cookie baked by Ann, and rather stale by the time McLeod unearthed the bottle,
the popular music stars at the time (“Madonna, Michael Jackson…Reba McIntyre,” the note reads)
a lottery ticket,
a warning (“house maybe haunted, not sure. So good luck,” Morrison wrote),
cigarette, gas, and case of 24 (beer) prices (“$6/pack, 49.9 – .56 per litre, and $25”, respectively), and
a question, that hits personally “is there a cure for AIDS yet?”
In the note, Morrison, Grasely and Taylor identified as gay and outed Szender as straight. “That’s what we are. We’re quite happy to be that way,” Grasely reminisces over why they chose to speak about their sexuality on the note. At the time, Cambridge did not have a Pride event. Last year, 2023, the first Pride was organized in Cambridge to great success.
Grasely recalls Cambridge at the time as any other small town when it came to LGBTQIA+ acceptance. She also recalled the fear and sadness surrounding AIDS. “I had a few friends affected by AIDS. They’re not alive anymore. It’s how they passed away,” Grasely explains.
AIDS was first described in North America just about over a decade earlier from when Taylor, Grasely, Morrison and Szender left their time capsule for McCleod to accidentally find. In 1987, the first antiretroviral drug became available to treat HIV.
In 1992, at their renovation party at the Queenston house, writing that note, they longed more than they wanted an answer for “Is there a cure for AIDS yet?” “We all lived through it. I mean, we didn’t all live through it. But it was in the news all the time,” Grasely recalls of the long shadow that AIDS casted and still casts on the LGBTQIA+ community all over the world.
That same year, the first antiretroviral cocktails began to be sold. The group of Prestonian friends would not know then these cocktails would become nearly lifesaving, extending people’s lives until old age. But today, McCleod would not have a happier answer: we still do not have a cure for AIDS.
The never-ending Preston time capsule
McCleod and Taylor connected through Facebook where McCleod posted about her unusual finding in the drywall to 576 post reactions, and over 120 comments of Prestonians and Cantabrigians scattered worldwide and around Canada.
The time capsule has become a testament to a house that seems to be loved by everyone who’s lived in it. “One day a man said to me, ‘this is my grandmother’s house,’ and even showed us a photo of his family. He said, ‘if you ever want to sell it, I’d like to buy it.’,” McCleod says of a man who once came by the house.
McCleod is getting ready to patch up the drywall and leave behind her own tokens for the time capsule: a note containing an update of her own renovations, what essentials cost today, what entertainment is currently like, and maybe even a “joint; after all, marijuana is legal now,” she chuckles. “The old owners are also coming over to leave their own keepsakes,” McLeod adds.
So if you’re living at Queenston Road and you’re renovating thirty years from now, and happen to find a time capsule, know that your house has been well lived.
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