HISTORY OF A LITTLE CHILD  (continued)

I had never known Maydeth Scott until the other day when a woman left a message on my answering machine. Nancy Duphily, a professor of nursing at a Massachusetts college said she had discovered an amazing baby book in an antique shop and bought it for five dollars. It had apparently been buried deep in a stack of old piano sheet music. Most mothers begin recording the intimate details of a baby’s life, get distracted and taper off. This book was filled cover to cover.

"Are you related to Emerson and Pearl Scott of Upton?" she asked. "I was searching online and found an article you wrote about them on a web site. I think I have something that belongs to your family."

Maydeth’s baby book arrived in the mail a week later. The pale-blue cloth cover looks almost new, but the pages smell of long lost decades. A delicate wildflower is pressed inside the opening page. Someone, most certainly her mother Pearl, neatly traced the outline of Maydeth’s tiny hand, once at three months and again at ten months. There are roughly two dozen pages filled with details in her mother’s careful script – the full arc of one brief human life. The book opens with five faded baby pictures. It ends with a chilling account of the accident and Maydeth’s funeral notice, cut from the newspaper on New Year’s day, 1931, two weeks before she would have been two.

But what we have of those two years is rich indeed, thanks to her mother, and to a kind teacher from Massachusetts and to the invention of the Internet. And that’s really what this story is about. My father, who is the same age today as Maydeth would have been, remembers her distantly. He says there was always a photograph of her in an oval frame that hung in the living room of his Aunt Pearl and Uncle Emerson’s house. I remember it, vaguely, from a decade of holidays there – or maybe I don’t. But until now my father’s cousin Maydeth was a ghostly figure – a blonde child on the wall, a lamb on a miniature tombstone, a tale told in hushed tones.

Now we have her history. From Maydeth’s book we know every single gift she received at birth and on her first birthday, and who gave each one. We know who visited at the hospital – in order of appearance – and when she first came home. We have her baptismal certificate from the Upton Congregational Church. We know that Maydeth favored spinach, Puffed Rice, vegetable soup and that her favorite fruit was "na-nas". We know that Maydeth first crawled while at the old family camp at Cape Cod, where, when she could not sleep, her father would put her in the car and drive and drive until she dozed. She stood at eight months and walked on her first birthday.

Maydeth preferred to call everyone, even her mother and her 80-year old aunts, by their first name. She liked going out with her father to collect the horse and the cow, but insisted on calling both animals "cows". The same was true for a goat, but sheep, instead, were different. They were "kitties", as were ducks, and, of course, so were cats. During the only summer and fall when she could toddle, she discovered the taste of vegetables from the garden, fresh-picked apples, blackberries and thimbleberries.

CONTINUE to read MAYDETH SCOTT