diary

My mom was a world class diarist.

My father gave her one of these 5 year diaries, the kind that have a space about ¾” by 5” for each day. He gave it to her when she graduated from high school. She wrote in those diaries until the week she died 47 years later. She rarely missed a day.

You can’t write too much in that kind of space with a fountain pen. But she covered the important things in her life.

The day my dad goes to work in the morning and is killed before the end of the work day she covers the event carefully -- in one sentence.

She didn’t mean it was not important to her, or that she did not love my dad. There wasn’t room in the assigned space for a long discourse.

A week later she pours out her grief: “I am lonesome.”

I would have written a book of “woe is me” prose, but mom in her grieving covered it all in a few words.

As I look at it from this age, it seems so natural. She couldn't call her mom. Neither of them had phones. She couldn’t talk to me, I was 4. She had no neighbors in north Idaho, and few friends, none who were close.

Those gals were tough, my mom and her ilk. They put their lives back together and made the best of it.

Thanks mom. Even if you didn’t write as much as I might have liked, what you did write is so insightful.

Dad died in the fall of 1941, 66 years ago. I was 4, mom 24 and my sister a few months old. Dad was 28 when he died.