Five Nights in Milford: Third Annual Writer’s Digest Personal Essay Awards Winner

Congratulations to Toni Lepeska, the grand-prize winner of the Third Annual Writer's Digest Personal Essay Awards. 

Toni Lepeska is a Memphis journalist, essayist, and contributing author of two books. She uses personal stories and hard-won perspectives to help “adult orphans” find their own path toward healing. Toni loves dazzlingly blue skies, big dogs suitable for tight hugs, and a man who married her at a chaotic time—around the beginning of life without her parents. She spent the next eight years sifting through the contents of her childhood home. Wrestling a tangle of emotions, she rediscovered the sense of safety she’d thought was lost forever. Find out more about Toni at ToniLepeska.com.

Here's her winning essay, "Five Nights in Milford."

By Toni Lepeska 

I am alone, more than fifteen hundred miles away from home, in an unfinished basement illuminated by a single shop light to save what’s left of my family. My grandfather built this Cape Cod-style house in Milford, Conn., 70 years ago. My daddy grew up in it, and my uncle brought his bride to this home. They are all dead now. Everyone who ever lived in this house is dead, but my uncle’s hoard is here. It is as tall as I am and as wide as an entire basement wall. The mound feels like a single, impenetrable, impossible mass. It’s the last of his accumulated possessions. I know it hides gold. Emotional gold. The essence of my family.

It’s all that is left of them.

With hands on my waist and elbows cocked out, I look like I’m in command, but I’m not sure where to begin.

How in the world am I going to do this?

Hoards seem to be a genetic component of my family, but I’ve never had to dismantle one this massive to find the stuff worth keeping. It puzzles me that despite his attachment to stuff, Uncle Karl did not sign a will for the distribution of his property. And my aunt, his wife, who survived him by six years, was not medically fit to make a will the courts would accept.

That means her family is inheriting everything. People I barely know.

I asked one thing of them. Allow me to go through my family’s things.

They gave me five nights.

Each night, I have slept in the room where my uncle died. I turn off the lights, navigate around bags of clothes, and plop into bed. I fix my eyes above me, on the light globes that feature little painted gold stars. And I feel as if my family is there, hovering just below the ceiling. They are all smiling at me, but there’s something more in their expressions. They like what I’m doing. They are proud of me. I see that, but there’s still something more. I cannot put my finger on it. But tonight, I’ve got to wrap my head around how to do this job in the basement because tomorrow, my aunt’s family arrives with workers in masks and gloves. They will take everything but whatever I’ve saved to ship home to Memphis.

To overcome the hoard, I must first break it down visually. National Geographic magazines stacked like a skyscraper, which I imagine would plummet to the concrete if jostled, don’t hold any interest for me. Derelict pieces of furniture and old-fashioned TV trays support half-empty boxes and don’t appear to hold any significance. And then there are slender sticks of wood in various sizes and types, apparently discarded from home-improvement projects. They are interspersed within the mound. I’ve got to be careful not to get stabbed.

You cannot judge a hoard by what you can see. You take it apart and examine everything. Only yesterday, I discovered a dainty tin box in my uncle’s cluttered study. I opened it and gasped. It was a lock of my grandmother’s hair.

Yup, I’m going to have to be like mythical Indian Jones on a hunt. I know somewhere in this mound are things that were a part of my family. Things that, in a way, will connect me with them. Things that tell our story. Things that will be lost to me if I do not save them.

I pick a spot closest to the shop light. It makes sense to start with what I can reach. I am going to go big. I grab a seatless, wooden chair, hoist it above my shoulders, and toss it atop the mound, out of the way. Next is a box of metal gutter parts and a trouble light with a school-bus-yellow cord. I hurl a shallow, open box of assorted plastic bags up and away. In quick succession, I fling yellowed newspapers and three-ring binders up to clear the peak of the mound. I grasp a water-stained textbook. It careens over the pile and into the bare, concrete wall, but clips one of the boxes on the way.

Please don’t. Don’t…

But it does. The box tips to its side. Plastic bags avalanche down to my feet.

I cannot be out-and-out angry with Uncle Karl, even as I stand here trying to avoid a domino effect by knocking over one of the dozens of cleansed mayonnaise and pickle jars at my heels. Perhaps of all my uncles, I was closest to him. He was a taller, older version of my daddy, yet distinctively different. In their younger years, they looked like professors. Hair the color of unspent charcoal. Goatees and glasses. People wondered if they were twins, though they were born eight years apart. It was in the internals that they diverged.

Dad cracked jokes that were so bad, they demanded a chuckle, but I don’t remember a single time Uncle Karl laughed with complete abandon or made silly faces like Daddy. And while Dad read the local newspaper from end-to-end each morning, Uncle Karl devoured works on philosophy and art history. He penned essays as heavy as a complete set of World Book encyclopedias. He wrote about Gothic cathedral architecture, the Nazi regime’s genocidal rampage, and naturalism versus religion. Uncle Karl was all adult.

I loved them both.

I visited their hometown for the first time at age 16. Though Uncle Karl didn’t have any children, he knew how to delight a young girl with untapped adventure in her soul. He took me to New York City to see the Empire State Building. Into his 80s, he persisted as a tour guide. One afternoon, reclined in a hospital bed after a devastating fall on an icy porch, he suggested I take in a local park near the sea in an adjoining city.

After he died, I did.

***

I will miss something valuable if I don’t make it through this pile.

I do not want another avalanche. Out with the manic approach. I shift to surgical mode. I shove the plastic bags into a big box and set it aside, making sure this time, the container is properly balanced on the hoard. I don’t want it coming down again.

What’s next?

I pick up a shirt cardboard insert – Why wasn’t this thrown away? – and whirl around to figure out where to put it. The only garbage can I have down here is tiny and full. I put the shirt thingy on top of an open box.

This is impossible. I’m not getting anywhere.

But I decide to give it one more shot and leverage a piece of plywood wedged into the hoard to lift the mass on top of it. I peer beneath. The technique works. I’ve hit gold.

“Daddy!”

In goes my free hand to retrieve a photograph of my father as a young man. I’m amazed the frame is not broken. I check the area for more photos, and finding none, turn to gaze at Dad’s image.

“Daddy! You’re here!”

His smile is seven inches from mine. We are connected again. It’s a glorious treasure. My grin fades, though. If he were here, I’d tell him all my woes.

“Daddy. Oh, Daddy.”

I am in Milford because of him. I am here in his stead. When Uncle Karl died, my aunt kept saying, “Karl’s brother is coming,” as if he was going to set everything in order. I turned from the sink of soapy dishes to face the kitchen table.

“Aunt Lore,” I said, “I’m sorry. Daddy died.”

“He did?” she said. “Oh.”

But she would forget again, and I’d tell her again and again. It was as if it was 10 years earlier. It was like Dad had just died.

***

I set Dad’s photo on the staircase to the kitchen and then make my way back to the hoard. I pull on a couple of boards, move a few boxes, and twist my neck to peer into crevices. Nothing. I feel beaten. I lace my way between dirty window screens, boxes of curtain rods, and a roll of burlap to get back to the staircase. I pick up Dad’s photo and take a last glance at the hoard.

What am I leaving behind?

The staircase groans with each step. I get closer and closer to the light coming through the open door of the kitchen. As I step through the threshold, it’s too bright. I squint. The tiny table in the center of the room is crowded with various mismatched sets of dinnerware. I shove a few pieces aside to make way for my treasure, but I do not take a seat. Instead, my eyes dart around the room. It’s hard to put into words what I feel. Warmth comes to mind. This is the space in the house where my family socialized the most. We ate meals here. We shared stories here. We planned outings here.

The memories roll through my mind like a film strip. I remember a phrase that recording artist Amy Grant put into song years ago.

“If these walls could speak.”

I am looking at this wall, and then the next wall, and then the third and fourth wall as I say these words. It’s as if I’m giving each side of the kitchen an opportunity to tell my family’s story. And, of course, there is nothing, nothing but my own memories. That’s when the first tears of my visit make their appearance.

I blubber out the lines of the song and end with open-mouthed sobbing.

Everything will be erased. Nothing of them will be left. Nothing.

I blubber some more. And then, an idea pops into my head. It’s like I was gifted it from above.

I wipe my tears, grab an indelible, black marker, and yank open the door to the basement. The stairs creak in rhythmic succession, as if part of a happy dance. I don’t want to be obnoxious so I look for a rafter close to a wall. I want hidden space. I pull a stool over, and with my back about a foot from the concrete wall, I lift myself to a support beam. I manage to reach it on tippytoes.

And I write.

“Built by the Lepeska Family, which resided in the Milford area from 1920 to 2022 after leaving Austria and Germany. Beloved grandfather, uncle, and father resided in these rooms. Memorialized this day, May 20, 2022, by T.L. Wansley.”

Not exactly my finest work. I ad-libbed. It’s hard to write above your head, vertically, in feeble light with swollen eyes. But I step down, crane my neck, and admire the job.

“There. Now we will always be here.”

I’m in awe. I don’t feel like crying anymore. I’m actually smiling. I don’t feel driven to save every potential thing with my family’s imprint on it. Their stories are safe within me. They are safe within me. I carry our family legacy. They’ve entrusted it to me. As I live and as I write, I create a sort of eternal footprint for all of us. My five nights in Milford conclude with renewed purpose and vigor. I am not alone. My family is with me wherever I go.

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