It started on an ordinary spring afternoon in Great Village, NS, the kind of day when antique shops whisper promises of hidden treasures. My aunt and I — partners in rummaging adventures — were poking through the usual creaky cabinets and dust-coated corners when she called me over, a musty, swollen book in hand.

“Look at this,” she says, eyes wide. Scrawled across the top corner of the fragile inside cover: Elizabeth Blaikie, Mount Allison Ladies’ College, 1919.

I flipped it open.

A love letter — well, more of a “don’t write me, I’ll write you” sort of letter. A Bible class schedule — Palestine was the topic that week. A skating party ticket. A Christmas napkin swatch. A cherry pit saved from a dessert gone slightly wrong at the Sackville Ice Cream Parlour. Handwritten critiques of cafeteria potatoes (“never again”) and glowing reviews of the cherry pie (“always”).

Every page held a secret, a story, or a snippet of gossip.

My 16-year-old daughter flipped through the brittle pages and summed it up best: “Elizabeth was a queen.”

And she’s right. The more I read, the more I agree.

Elizabeth — whose real name, I later discovered, was Lillian Elizabeth Blaikie — was independent, self-assured, and delightfully rebellious. Young, but not carefree; she was too involved in the lives of her peers to be untroubled. This was not the dull, distant world of black and white photos and stiff portraits. The diary holds more than one note reminding her and her peers about one rule or another.

She seemed to be constantly surrounded by other young women getting ready for one event or another, sharing the latest gossip, and sometimes even doing schoolwork. This was campus life in full colour — lively, messy, human.

Naturally, I had questions. How did this diary, so full of life, end up forgotten in a dusty shop?

That’s where my aunt comes back in. A master of ancestral investigating, she traced Lillian’s story: one of 18 children from Great Village, she married George Patriquin, raised three children (including twins), and lived to the age of 86. She died in 1987; the last of her children passed in 2018. And so, the diary ends up in the corner of her hometown antique shop, full of memories waiting to be read.

Today, her diary lives in the Mount Allison Library Archives — right where it belongs. A century-old time capsule, finally home.

I’ve learned something from this adventure back in time and I’m grateful to Lillian Elizabeth Blaikie for it.

Surround yourself with people who understand you and celebrate with you. Eat the cherry ice cream. Cling to the people who make you better. Don’t take yourself too seriously. The way we preserve our own moments that will soon become history is by writing them down. Not on social media, but by hand.

Lillian Elizabeth Blaikie wasn’t just keeping a diary. She was leaving behind a legacy — cherry pits, gossip, rebellious notes, and all.