The Church Time Capsule We Couldn't Find

In 1975, the members of Cedar Fork Community Church buried a time capsule on the south lawn with a prayer, a brass marker and firm instructions that it be opened in fifty years. This spring, the fifty years came due. The capsule did not.

In our defense, the brass marker was moved in 1989, when the trustees widened the parking lot so the Hendersons would stop parking on the hydrangeas. Nobody wrote down where the marker went, or where it came from. That is how trustees are made. The ones who write things down get put on Finance.

Pastor Dale is thirty-four and still believes a committee can accomplish something on a Saturday. He announced the Time Capsule Homecoming from the pulpit, printed it in the bulletin and had the youth group make a banner. Seventy-one people came. So did a young man from the Tanner’s Crossing Ledger with a camera, which is how a church learns humility in front of witnesses.

At ten o’clock Pastor Dale read from Ecclesiastes, “a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted” (Ecclesiastes 3:2), and handed my husband Lyle a shovel.

Lyle has been certain of things for fifty-two years of marriage. He was certain about the shortcut through Emporia, certain about the aluminum siding and certain the casserole dish in my cupboard belongs to his sister. He walked straight to the dogwood by the fellowship hall and said, “Here. I was standing right here. I had on my brown suit.”

“You wore that suit to every event between 1971 and 1983,” I said. “It’s not a landmark.”

He dug anyway. Two feet down he found a root, a softball and a strong opinion from Merle Ostrander, who chairs the trustees and was certain it was by the flagpole.

Merle had been fourteen in 1975. He remembered the ceremony vividly, because Darlene Pike sat in front of him and he was sweet on her, so his mother made him keep his eyes on the flag through the entire benediction. “I could see that flagpole the whole time,” he said. “Plain as day.”

So we dug by the flagpole.

Then Bernice Tull arrived with her late husband’s metal detector, which she had never operated and which beeped like a smoke alarm with a grievance. It found nine bottle caps, a coffee can lid, an old church key of the bottle-opening variety, which confused the junior high boys considerably, and Pastor Dale’s car keys, which he had set down twenty minutes earlier.

By noon the south lawn looked like a convention of moles. The Ruth Circle set out sandwiches on a folding table, because if there is going to be disappointment at a church, there is going to be pimento cheese.

People kept arriving with memories. Mrs. Gaither’s memory was by the cornerstone. The Kessler twins remembered the east side, but in two different spots, and they have not agreed on anything since the Eisenhower administration. Somebody’s grandson brought a drone. It found the Hendersons’ car, parked on the hydrangeas.

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At two o’clock Merle struck something metal by the downspout, and the whole congregation gathered around the hole as if it were a manger. The young man from the Ledger got down on one knee for the picture. Merle brushed away the dirt with great ceremony.

It was the septic tank lid.

“Well,” said Pastor Dale, after a moment, “that’s also good to know.”

Nobody said much for a while. Lyle went back to the dogwood and dug a little deeper, the way a man will tap a barometer that isn’t telling him what he wants.

Around four, a silver sedan pulled into the lot, and Opal Fenwick’s granddaughter helped her out of the passenger side. Opal is ninety-four and the last living member of the 1975 Time Capsule Committee. She had spent the morning at a great-grandson’s piano recital in Wichita, and she stood at the edge of the parking lot with her pocketbook over her arm and studied the lawn for a long time.

“Mercy,” she said. “Did you have a tornado?”

Pastor Dale explained. Opal listened politely, the way she has listened to six pastors explain things.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “It sleeted that day. Ground was hard as a skillet. We said the prayer outside and put it in the furnace room till spring.”

“And in the spring?” Pastor Dale asked.

Opal considered. “Well, then it was Easter. And then it was Vacation Bible School.”

We found it in the basement behind the shepherd’s crooks from the Christmas pageant, under a box marked WISE MEN, EXTRA BEARDS. It was an old army-surplus can with CEDAR FORK 1975 painted on the side in my mother-in-law’s handwriting, which made it the first time all day anybody in Lyle’s family had been right about anything.

We opened it on the fellowship hall table. There was a bulletin. There was a photograph of the youth group, all sideburns and plaid, with Merle in the back row gazing at the sky. There was a recipe card for lime Jell-O salad with cottage cheese and crushed pineapple, which three women immediately claimed had been stolen from their mothers.

And there was a letter from the 1975 Building Committee, typed on onionskin. Pastor Dale read it aloud.

“Dear Friends of the Future. We trust that by the time you read this, the leak over the choir loft has been resolved.”

Every head in the room turned toward the stairs. Up in the choir loft, in the third row of the altos, sits the blue bucket. It has its own robe hook.

We voted to put that letter right back in the new capsule, since it was still accurate and would save the next committee some typing. We added this year’s bulletin, a photograph of the youth group, Bernice’s bottle caps and a short written apology to the septic tank.

Then, because Lyle had dug the deepest hole and a man ought to be right about something once a decade, we buried the new capsule under the dogwood. Merle drew a careful map showing exactly where it was, with measurements from the downspout, the flagpole and the cornerstone.

And then, for safekeeping, we put the map in the capsule.