Monday, August 21, 1928

Continuing the story from the narrative. “The nurse maid was our legendary ‘Sleepy.’ Her name was Filepa. She came to us when I was perhaps about two years old. I couldn’t pronounce her name and she became Sleepy because that was as close as I could come to her name. She stayed with our family until after I was married and came back to Minnesota to spend a year because my mother had had a near nervous break down after Eleanor’s birth. Sleepy had been so much help and comfort to her that she agreed to come back and spend the year in the states.

In 1920 Sleepy was a great curiosity and of much interest to the people of LeRoy, Minnesota and you can imagine her experiences of winter in Minnesota with lots fo snow and coal stoves after her life int he orient! Then in 1933 after I graduated my father retired from business and they came back to live in California at Lakeport. They had become her family and she decided to stay with them so she came back and lived with them for several years. She had no children of her own, altho’ she told my mother that she had had two little boys who had died as infants.

Eventually she felt she had to go back to Manila where she lived with a niece who could write English and we kept track of her until the niece wrote us of her death. She could not write but she did read books in Taglogue. We didn’t know her age. When she came to Minnesota she needed a passport. She didn’t know when she was born, date or year. So we gave her a birthday and my father decided what she could remember of her childhood that she must have been about 37 in 1920. the year that she lived in Minnesota my father withheld her salary and then gave it to her ina lump sum when she got back to Manila. It was enough that she could buy a house of her own and she became a woman of substance in the little community where she lived besides a woman of the world with all her traveling! There are pictures of her among my pictures. She was devoted to Eleanor who was a bond between my mother and Sleepy.”