IN the world of things some objects appear to be just passing through while others are anchored by a thick coat of patina. The soul of patina, yes it has a soul – just look at it, the soul of patina is the unspoken remnant of someone else’s memory, evidence of what’s been well used, lost and found, caught up in a feud, drowned in a flood, scorched by love, or covered with one too many passes of roach spray.

Left behind in the basement of my 1853 house is a Hoosier cabinet. It has a clever little wind-up clock set into a cabinet door. I wind. It cranks. It goes. The tick and the tock are an octave apart – a rhythmic syncopated sound. Time was waiting for me to start it up again.

Behind that cabinet door is a ledger book. It’s stuck to the shelf from the weight of its own inertia. Paper absorbs all matter, all scents. So before I even pick up this book, its ink, the leather, the cotton, the glue are already drifting up and creeping around the inside of my nose. I lift it and turn it around and around. The edges are browned by grease and dirt from hands that touched everything a hand could touch. I open it. It’s filled with numbers, pencil notations of someone’s reckoning.

I find tucked inside a letter postmarked from here to there and a stamped ticket used to make passage from an old world to a new. This object that I held in my hands, this steamship ticket tucked inside this book, all of which belonged to this house, became an entrance point to the other side of something. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but as I held this object, this steamship ticket in my hands I suddenly felt that I was there, with this young woman. I call her Olivia for no other reason than the fact that I like the name.

I was there – with Olivia, or I was Olivia. I was on a ship. We were sharing the same sensations. I was experiencing a powerful chapter in this young woman’s life, filled with desire, hope and expectations. There I was standing in the world of someone who lived one hundred and fifty years ago. There we were. Here I am.

MAIL had arrived from America. Fathers, brothers, husbands had stuffed wages into envelopes mailed with letters of longing, and promises, and warnings of the crude treatment women might endure on the journey across; tales of women voyaging alone, kidnapped and sold into slavery, children lost and never found.

Days before we sailed I watched my anxious mother read the posted requirements for those who were allowed to come onboard. She was relieved that our particulars did not pour us into the column of the rejected and disbarred. We were disease free and had necessary amount of the money to enter our new country. She purchased our tickets.

Then there we were, in steerage. For two long weeks this would be our home. We sat on our crammed bundles, crammed with nervous anticipation. My mother was facing the past we left behind. My two brothers ran around us like drunken tarantella dancers. Tearful baby brother put a tiny hand to mother’s worried brow. Grandfather sat with his back to all of us; the old man wanted nothing more than to be left in his dusty old world, but he was asked by fathers, brothers, husbands to be our protector on this journey. Pitifully ill-equipped by his age, he apprehensively agreed to make the sea trip. Less than one month after we landed he slipped away from us in his sleep. He left his heavy body in the bed. His spirit had already gone on its way back to old familiar ground.

I wandered up and out of steerage to the first class decks daily. I knew I was pretty enough to do it. My hands held the cold railing running between me and the wide water. Transfixed by the edge of that impossibly faraway, ever so straight horizon. Lady Liberty would break the line in a day or so. I was waiting for her and all that she promised.

I could feel the unbounded force of this ocean body lifting me and the fifty-thousand tons of steamship under my feet. I thought about men below me, men wet with sweat, strong, knee deep in coal and married to the firebox; driving all of this, me and my expectations forward. I felt my body pushing up against the firm unknown future. All those little waves breaking, falling into each other, over and over, again and again, each one a promise of more. I wanted all that was promised and more, more relentless forward motion. I felt the quiver, the taut bow release. I was arrowing west.

It felt exhilarating to be so completely someone else. The last time something like this happened to me, it occurred while living in another very old house. At the time I was more bewildered. But I’ll tell that tale another time. Let me finish here by saying that last person who knew Olivia was probably her great niece, Theresa. My neighbor told me about Theresa, the last in a long line of the generations who lived here. She was the last descendant of the family who owned my 1853 house before I bought the house. Olivia and Theresa are both gone, but I came across Olivia’s wandering spirit again when I found a crocodile belt in a drawer in a dresser in a room on the third floor of my 1853 house.