A family in Virginia who were mourning the loss of their beloved grandma enjoyed a brief moment of levity after finding something very unusual in the back of her freezer.
Meat, vegetables and other mealtime leftovers are likely to make up the bulk of what you would find in the average American freezer compartment, but Andy Wiseman’s family discovered something decidedly different at his grandmother’s house: a biscuit wrapped in a note.
“My granny passed away last month,” Wiseman told Newsweek. “She had just turned 90. I used to go and see her every week. We were very close.”
Wiseman said his mom, Linda, was the one who discovered this most unusual of food-based keepsakes. “She found it during the clean out [of his grandma’s home],” he said. “It was one of the last things she found.”
The note included with the biscuit read: “Biscuit made by Mrs. Dara L Chambers in August 1940 at the Blankenship home.”
The 84-year-old biscuit. It’s thought to have been baked for Andy Wiseman’s great uncle.
Reddit/u/hoop-d-lishus
Wiseman said the family was initially amused by the discovery but then eager to find out what significance it had. It turned out to have a little more than they may have realized.
“It was a great moment of levity in an otherwise stressful situation. There were a lot of laughs and bewilderment,” he said. “As well as a few jokes about eating it.”
Wiseman said they were finally able to get some answers about why it was in the freezer from his great aunt, his grandmother’s last surviving sister.
“She indicated it was likely saved by their brother’s first wife,” Wiseman said. “It would have been her grandmother’s. Perhaps her last batch.”
Wiseman’s great uncle served in the Second World War and he thinks the biscuit was potentially made for his uncle before he went to war and then kept by him as a memento of his mom. “He never had kids and lived in the same house forever, ” he said.
Incredibly, based on those calculations, the biscuit has been in the family for 84 years. Wiseman said the biscuit was likely made in Buckingham County, where his great uncle lived, before traveling on to Staunton in Virginia.
Whatever his great uncle’s attachment to it, ultimately, following his death, this unusual heirloom was passed on to Wiseman’s grandma, who kept hold of it for a further 10 years before her own passing.
In other hands, this kind of discovery might have eventually been discarded in the trash but Wiseman’s mother Linda saw the discovery as a chance to lighten the mood on what remained as a day of “bittersweet moments.”
He said the biscuit did its job if that was the case, providing a “much needed laugh and conversation after the clean out.” Better still, Wiseman said that the legacy of the biscuit and the memories of family now passed lives on.
“The biscuit is now in my parents’ freezer for my brothers and I to deal with,” he said. Let’s just hope no one finds it during a nighttime search for an unauthorized midnight snack.
