The coin, a 1926 silver dollar, sits front and center in the belt buckles ‘window’ surrounded by fancy scroll work. The buckle came, if it came with a coin at all, with a different one. Or, more likely, with a picture of one hinting to the uneducated buyer as to it’s purpose.

The belt itself consists of thick broken-in brown leather dotted with buffalo nickel-style rivets. The original belt holes are hard to make out, camouflaged by at least six extra ‘punches’ added in by my grandfather who, even when young and spry, was a lean man. I imagine that as he grew older and thinner he punch more holes so that the belt would continue to fit.

When my grandfather passed away towards the end of my freshman year of college, my entire family convened in Seattle, WA for a memorial service. His widow had already started cleaning out the house, something she had had a head start on as he spent most of his last six months in the hospital.  My uncle Peter and Aunt Heather took on his country home in northern Washington but we, the non-Seattle based cousins didn’t comb through old closets or rummage through trunks. I guess that I thought at the time that he must have had a hyper-detailed will that would leave each of us a memory affixed to a physical object, an unfair assumption but an assumption I made quite quickly and was thus disappointed when I wasn’t handed a flannel or hat or book.

This past Thanksgiving, one of my relatives showed up with a big bag of belts and braces that had been salvaged from his house. Rummaging through them, I found the one that is now sitting beside by computer. My uncle Peter helped me take a coin out of a different one and place it into it’s new buffalo-nickel themed home, completing it, although artificially, as it’s not the coin that had been there when Bill wore it.

I was very close to my grandfather. Each summer for most of my childhood he would meet my family in Northern Ontario, CA. There we would hop into a motor boat or board a pontoon plane and make our way through Lake Temagami to Ojibway. Ojibway is a ‘family camp’ that shares an island with it’s cousin and financial partner Keewaydin, one of the oldest non-religious summer camps in North America. While it’s first summer was in 1893, it didn’t settle on Devil’s Island until 1901. The camp runs much that same as it did when it first opened. Wood canvas canoes are carried using tump lines, Click (Canada’s answer to Spam) is a staple, and children as young as eight go out on 20 day adventures that often include run-ins with bears, moose, and Keewaydin’s arch rival Wabun. William Whelen Biddle served as a guide at Keewayden somewhere between graduating from Dartmouth, getting a Master’s in education from Harvard, serving in the US Army, teaching English, working for the National Forest Service, and writing a popular weather column which, for 20 years managed to balance weather advice with poetry.

I imagine he wore this belt on one of his many canoe trips. One night there may have been a storm and it was used to fasten together tent poles. Later, when we all convened at Ojibway, it may have been there around his waist when he taught me the stern-specific j-stroke or when he told us bedtime stories over a camp fire sipping whiskey from a tin can he insisted on fashioning into a cup despite an abundance of glass, plastic, and paper options.

I have to punch some new holes so that it will fit me. I would take it to a cobbler, but Bill would have rolled his eyes at me if I suggested that. As I pull out my swiss army knife, open up the awl, and start pushing it through the leather, I can’t help but think of how many stories the leather holds and how many more it will collect before it’s finally disintegrated, no longer able to absorb any more.