What To Read?

I had five library books on hand when the library closed except for curbside pickup. I decided when I finished reading those five I would do something I've been meaning to do for years - go back and read Mom's diaries.

Beginning with this one - "An Old Fashioned Keepbook - Our Old Fashioned Country Diary for 1983".

It is a very attractive diary with pictures and quotes on every two-page layout. Mom used the small left hand space to record temperatures, wind direction, sky conditions, basically the weather for the day.
In the larger right hand spaces she wrote about her day - what she did, who she went to see or who might have stopped by, who she wrote to or got a letter from, when she changed the furnace filter and when the fuel oil barrel or propane at the stock tank was filled and what it cost. Daily life.

On June 9 as her neighbor Bryan was helping her take the ring out of the boar's nose, she got her finger ripped open by a tusk. It required 10 stitches and help with the chores and milking for several weeks. I went over every morning and evening to be her chore girl. It was on those morning's, having some toast and, for me what would usually have been tea, I learned to drink coffee because that is what she drank. Forty years old and I became a coffee drinker. I had to have lots of sugar and alot of the milk I had just worked for in mine in order to drink it, but eventually I came to like it and then depend on it, gradually dropping the milk and sugar.

This diary also had a two page spread for each of the holidays. Some of them are still blank but on this one, for Halloween, she kept track of the little trick-or-treaters, mostly neighborhood kids, and what she handed out - 'Snickers candy bars'.

At the back were pages for 'Weddings & Anniversaries of 1983' (blank), 'Graduations, Promotions & Milestone Days of 1983' (blank) and this one - 'Birthdays' with only one entry, the birth of the last of her grandchildren, Ian Michael born April 21.

I, my younger children, Kari and Preston, older son Douglas and his son Brock were usually there several times a week, even after Mom got the stitches out of her finger. (Doug had temporary custody of his son that year.)

Reading my mother's entries brought back so many memories. So many that I got out my journal from that time (83-84) and reread it. Thirty-seven years ago - moving from 'the little house' over to 'Mrs. Elliot's' and back again. It was an unsettled time in my life, but oh, the memories.

Grandson Brock and my sheep at Mrs. Elliot's

This diary of Mom's begins with the last five days of December, '82. I was hoping she had recorded who gave this unique little book to her, but alas. Does any family member remember? It might have even been me. I can't remember, but it is the kind of diary I would have chosen for her. This morning I found my Christmas ideas list from 1982 and while her name isn't on that same page, two pages before I wrote, "Mom-Diary?".

What other memories will be triggered as I continue reading her diaries?