Mar 9, 2017 4 min read

I was 18 miles down the windy bike trail in Ohio when my phone rang.

“Guess what I found under the stairs?”

It was the farmer, who’d stopped his work rebuilding our staircase to call me with the news. I thought Money!, but no.

“The last page of a book about the three little pigs,” he said. “It was stuck under the bottom step.” He concluded that the page was there when the stairs were first built, which would have been when the house was built – 1899.

A century of people left the stairs shabby and the railing wobbly. The replacement of the stairs is one of the last bits of renovation before we sell this old house, and so the farmer tore into them, stranding me either on the second floor (no kitchen access) or the first floor (no bed or shower), which is why I was miles away on my bike while he rebuilt.

The book page is thick – almost cardboard – and bears coffee-colored water stains. The illustration is in pen and ink, depicting Mr. Pig sitting in an armchair, his hooved foot on a floral tuffet and his head resting on a pillow. There’s tea on a side table and a black kettle boiling in a fireplace. The pig has a smug smile. We all know what that smile is about.

The wolf climbed up on the roof to come down the chimney. But the little pig heard him. He made a big fire in the fireplace. The wolf tumbled into it and was burned up. Then the little pig was happy.

Those of us who were children a long time ago know the violent version of that fairytale: the wolf – aka Supper – is in that kettle.

The page is intriguing. We know the house was built by a doctor, and stayed in that family for several generations. How would the page of a children’s book end up in a sealed pocket under a staircase?

It’s unlikely people were living in the house before the staircase was complete, so someone had to bring the book to the building site. Did the doctor bring his family to have a look at their new home, and a child forgot the book? Did the carpenter need a flat surface for glue or tools, and used a book he found in his buggy?

The page is a tantalizing mystery, a time capsule that tells a tiny story of what my beloved old Victorian house was like as a child. Babies were born here; some grew old and died here. The grand oak in my front yard was once a seedling, perhaps planted around the same time that book was published.

History not confirmed in writing is open for revision and embellishment, and so here’s my version. As the house was nearing completion, the young, handsome doctor brought his beautiful wife and three daughters to have a look. They planned a picnic lunch on the front porch and the middle daughter – I’ll call her Elizabeth – brought some of her picture books. Not wanting to share her favorite – the fairytales – Elizabeth slipped into the front hallway and tucked the book into an open space between the first and second steps, and forgot about it. Everything dissolved into time, except that one page.

Somewhere in the Three Little Pigs fairytale is a moral about building a strong and sturdy house. That fragile, dusty last page of a bully’s comeuppance is the perfect example of that. More than a century later, nothing could blow the house down. It’s still standing, strong as ever.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.