The Lost Diaries
Adventures of a Girl
Over the years, I’ve come into possession of a handful of family diaries. One belonged to a great aunt we called crazy Aunt Matt. Reading the gory details in her diary explains why she went batty. Another one was a pocket-sized diary issued to servicemen during World War II. This one belonged to a homesick sailor who mostly complained about the heat, hardly stuff of novels. A third diary, titled by the young author as the “Adventures of a Girl,” was more of a memory book written over the course of a year. Her entries reflect the optimism and energy of youth. It’s my favorite. It’s posted here in its lightly edited form. Have a look.
Adventures of a Girl
ONE: Early Spring, 1950. Snyder, Oklahoma.
“The cats cried outside her window all night long,” an old aunt repeated to each set of arriving relatives. Again and again, she said the cats wailed like crying babies, “She is dead. She is dead. She is dead.” I imagined them crouched under the porch, in threes and fours watching in conspiratorial quiet as the mourners arrived. Women in flowered shirt waists hugged, pressing their ample bosoms against each other. The men, all in polished boots, clasped each other in rough but brief embraces.
Their vigil over, the cats edged into the shadows to spend the day napping.
My great-grandmother is the first really old person I remember. Even then, I saw her only once, maybe twice, including when she was dead. The first time, I was looking for the kitchen when I wandered into her room from the hallway connecting the living room to the kitchen. Mama, as everyone called her, was propped up on pillows against the headboard. She was tiny and shrunken like the mummified Indian princess I once saw at a trading post in Colorado. Sitting beside her pillow was a red Folger’s can, wide enough to catch tobacco juice spit in its proximity. Although I never read her obituary, I bet it didn’t mention her snuff-dipping habit or her fondness of dime novels. My grandmother, the oldest of Mama’s ten children, once remarked that as a young girl she remembers her mother always propped up in bed reading those little books. “She never helped Papa in the fields,” she added, as if raising ten children on a poor excuse for a farm weren’t occupation enough.
But my grandmother had a point. There was plenty of work to be done and farm wives with broods of children probably didn’t have the spare time for reading and dipping snuff. Mama must have been fun though. Her grandchildren relate how she loved telling them ghost stories that scared them out of their wits. Mama was the spirited daughter of a family who raised cattle for a living and played music at dances for fun.
But all I saw that day was a weathered old woman, lying in a lumpy old bed in a room tacked onto the back of the house. The house, built according to someone’s idea of Victorian styling, sat on the corner across from the town’s one gas station. The porch, framed in curlicue wooden accents provided the only shade around. The packed dirt yard featured a long-dead skeletal tree. Rooms had been added on the side and back of the house as money allowed. Apparently the allowance didn’t cover the cost of paint. Instead, the house, the porch and the fence all had weathered, like my great-grandmother, to shades of gray.
When I went to leave the room, I stopped at the foot of her bed, and for one brief moment, stared at the old woman, cushioned against the pillows. Then, wanting but resisting to break into a skip, I hurried toward the kitchen to join a noisy group of aunts and my own grandmother.
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