Write Me Down in History

When I was eleven years old I received a red leatherette diary, complete with lock and key, for Christmas.

I started writing in it on the first day of 1973 and one of the entries reads:

Today was kind of busy. After school I went to Camp Fire Girls. After that we picked up Jill from music lessons and then went home. I got a big gold star in my English notebook. Mrs. Frey said she was only going to give the big gold stars to the “almost perfect” notebooks and I got one. I’m so happy and proud of myself.”

Other entries chronicle fights with my brother, sleepovers with friends, and the saga of my best friend Debbie’s 6^th grade romance with Eric Lindgren. I had a secret crush on Eric, so I scrutinized the ups and downs of their relationship with keen interest, waiting for my chance to comfort him, should the path of true love not run smoothly. I wasn’t terribly dedicated to my journaling; my last entry was only 5 months later in May, but I started another journal at 17 and managed to write in it for almost two years before stopping three blank pages from the end. The handwriting is better and the entries are a little deeper, but the cringe-worthy content is of little interest to anyone but me.

 Or so I thought, until my 10 year old began reading quizzically over my shoulder. “It says you ‘slept in’ – did you do that back then?” he queried innocently. “Didn’t you have to get up early to work the crops on the farm?” There wasn’t really room for crops (or a farm) in the suburban neighborhood I grew up in, but his question made me realize he knows very little about my childhood, and that’s my fault. I guess I haven’t told him nearly as many “I walked to school barefoot in the snow” stories as my mother told me.

Mom began a tradition years ago of including a story from her childhood in her annual Christmas card to her children. One year she told of frog-gigging in the river bottom before the TVA flooded the Cumberland River to make the Cumberland Reservoir. Another year, she reminisced about her Aunt Pat teaching her to iron handkerchiefs with a flat iron heated on a wood stove. My mother has faithfully kept a journal for several years and the memories she’s recorded have provided the impetus for many of her stories.

When I asked her why she kept a journal, she said it was mostly because she dearly wished her grandmother had kept one; she would have loved reading about her daily life and its struggles and joys. My mother decided she didn’t want her posterity to have the same regrets.

I never knew my great-grandmother, Margaret (Maggie Jane) Humble, but my mother wisely wrote down her memories of this hardy, Kentucky farm woman. Maggie Jane was born 84 years before I entered the world, yet in the space of only three generations my life would bear little resemblance to hers.
  

I married at the modern age of 24 and, except for a few months in an apartment when we were first married, we’ve always lived in a home that had at least 4 bedrooms, central air conditioning, hot and cold running water, and carpeting or hardwood floors. Maggie Jane, one of 11 children, married Pleasant Bolden Bell when she was 19 years old. He built a two-room log cabin for them to start their married life in and they never left it or enlarged it. She never in her life had running water or electricity.

* * * *

At last count, we had 4 computers, 2 iPhones, 3 iPods, and 5 TVs. When my internet was recently out for a few days, I was nearly crippled in my efforts to pay bills, do schoolwork and find the answer to the all-important question, “What is a helgamite and what does it look like?” (It’s an aquatic larvae often used as fish bait; it looks like something that will bite you and make you wet your pants at the same time.)

Maggie Jane had a radio that her husband only allowed her to turn on in the morning for the news and weather, but her favorite program was The Lives and Loves of Helen Trent. She would turn it on when Pleasant left to do the chores and post my mother as a lookout by the window. If Grandpa finished early and was spied coming up the lane, my mother would run tell Maggie so she could turn it off.

* * * *

I would be embarrassed to count how many pieces of furniture are stuffed in the rooms of my house; we have at least eight couches spread over three floors of our home. When my clothes dryer recently broke, my husband came home with TWO dryers because he found such a great deal. The thought of ever moving again makes pyromania seem necessary.

Maggie Jane’s front room held two feather beds, a little table for the radio, some rocking chairs and a ladder made from hickory saplings resting against the wall that went up to the attic. The kitchen held a round oak table covered with an oilcloth. In the middle of the table was a canning jar filled with silverware, a covered butter bowl, and blue salt and pepper shakers.

* * * *

My husband and I recently spent several frustrating hours sorting out his company’s new medical benefits. We filled out papers for a Health Savings Account and debated the merits of Dental and Vision insurance and their deductibles. I run to the local pharmacy for everything from prescriptions to cough drops.

Maggie Jane was considered a doctor/midwife and people came from around the county for her to “doctor” them. She knew all the herbs and plants in the woods and their uses. In the corner cabinet she kept a glass jar that held the “cancer medicine” she made from the sheep sorrel plant. She gathered the leaves of the plant (about a million of them) and boiled them down into a gooey, black, stinky mixture, and it’s said she really did remove skin cancers with it.

* * * *

I once painted my bedroom wall 6 different colors before finding just the right shade called “Moroccan Leather.”

Maggie Jane papered her walls with pictures from magazines that people gave her.

* * * *

I shop at one of three nearby grocery stores that stock items from around the world. My pantry shelves bulge with canned goods, balsamic vinegars and gourmet pastas.

Maggie Jane had a hand-dug cellar under the back porch where she would send my mother some mornings to get a blue mason jar of peaches for breakfast. She canned food from her garden by cold packing, and it was done in a big black kettle over a fire, in the yard. There were never enough canning jars, so when the green beans were picked, my mother helped snap and spread them on a sheet in the yard. Covered with old lace curtains to keep off the bugs, they put them out in the morning and brought them in at night until they were dried by the sun. Once dried, they were strung on a string and hung from rafters in the attic.

* * * *

I had my first child at 26 in a hospital, attended by an obstetric team and a queasy husband. I would have three more over the next 15 years. When my kids got sick, I rushed them to a doctor, and when one was seriously injured, the combined efforts of hundreds of trained people pulled him from the brink of death and saved his life.

Maggie Jane had her first child at home at the age of 20 and over the next 24 years she had 12 more. When she was 33 years old, she buried her 1-year-old baby girl, Zona Elizabeth, who died from the whooping cough. She wrapped her in a little hand-stitched quilt, walked to the woods and buried her in a pine thicket. Eight years later, when she was 41, the flu epidemic of 1918 hit her home in Wayne County, Kentucky, and every member of the family was stricken. Her son, Jim Roe, was 14, healthy and handsome. He died on New Year’s Day. Her beautiful 16-year-old daughter, Lucinda, died 5 days later on January 6th. The ground was frozen too hard to dig a grave, so a neighbor built two wooden boxes and they put the bodies in the barn until the ground thawed enough to bury them.

* * * *

I never met Maggie, but I feel like I know her because she came to life in my mother’s memories. I do remember my Grandmother Dora.

She loved to quilt and garden, and she was partial to brightly patterned blouses and dangly earrings. She thought the Avon catalog held the latest and greatest, and she gave birth to my mother on her mother’s round oak table in Maggie Jane’s two-room log cabin by the light of a kerosene lamp.

But my children won’t know those things about my grandmother Dora, if I don’t follow the example set by my mother and write down my fleeting memories of her: she was an identical twin who never outgrew dressing like her sister, she created art out of tin cans and Styrofoam egg cartons, and she was a genuine country cook who could make cabbage and corn bread taste like gourmet cuisine.

Memories fade so easily if they aren’t recorded. Details that seem perfectly normal and commonplace at the time might be fascinating to our posterity. Do they even have Campfire Girls anymore? Maybe Eric Lindgren is now famous for something besides eating twelve dog biscuits at Eddie’s party (March 19, 1973’s entry – he did it on a dare.) One day, your journal could be a very interesting historical document. But if all it ever does is make your life more real to family who didn’t have a chance to know you, then a big gold star to you.