Dressed in a simple white gown with little pink flowers embroidered along the hem, I waited at the altar.
For how long doesn't matter. I do know I was alone-nobody was there to meet me at the end of the aisle. I had no bouquet and no attendants. Heck, my parents weren't even there.
It was the winter of 1957 and, I am told, it was particularly cold. By November, the trees surrounding Lake Fortune were completely bare and the children in town were ice skating on Thanksgiving.
On December 12, sometime in the afternoon, I was found in a box on the altar of the Cathedral of St. Francis. Father James had just finished the last mass of the day and was resting in his sitting room with his usual cup of tea. "I heard something," he said at the time. "I thought it was a kitten.
I took up my cane and went toward the sound which was coming from a cardboard box." Expecting to see a small kitten, he instead found me. Absent though was any indication of who I was or my age.
The newspapers reported that I was a pretty,brown eyed redhead in excellent health. I was clean and well fed. There was a stack of clean cloth diapers and two more tiny dresses in the box - one blue and one red. Present also was a silver locket which, when opened, was empty and all efforts to trace it,unsuccessful.
I was adopted and raised by the childless and long married Millicent and Harold Lewis. In honor of the church and the priest who found me, I was named Frances James Lewis.
Mine was a happy life. Each year I had a nice birthday party. My house was always full of friends and extended family. I never once felt like I didn't belong.
Every December 12, my parents brought me to the church. Perhaps they thought my birth parents would be there and would see what became of me. Whether they ever did, we never knew.
Every time I'd see a woman anywhere with red hair I would wonder-are you...?
Five years after my father passed, my mother also died. I buried her with the little locket. Inside I placed a picture of myself as a happy, smiling baby seated on the lap of the only mother I'd ever known.
In 1983, St. Francis caught fire. I cried as if my family home had burned down. For years, until an apartment complex was built there, I returned to the massive expanse of bare ground where the church had once stood.
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Story by Pamela Tyree Griffin
Photograph by : Gavin Mills
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