Today I am cleaning out the spare bedroom and getting it ready for the visitors that I hope to have this summer - my oldest son and my granddaughters. I came across an old appointment book from 1942 that my mother used for her journal. If she began writing in it that year then she would have been about nine years old. She, like I did when I was that age, obviously loved dogs and horses. The first pages is a table of contents, followed by a number of pages of kennel names that she imagined and then the stories that she wrote about beloved pets. There must be over 100 names that she came up with - names such as "Sunny Ridge", "Dardendale", "Broadlawn" and Wolveshampton".
Then comes her first short writing. Entitled "Gray Dawn" it reads as follows:
"Gray Dawn died on Memorial Day, 1929, falling quietly asleep on his rug close beside the desk in my study here in Sunnybank and forgetting to awaken.
Gray Dawn's color was a soft blue merle."
Further on is the story of Lad:
"Greatest of all Sunnybank collies was Lad. he was the palaces first collie. He was a great and gallant dog. Sunnybank Lad died one September day in 1918 when, the sixteen year old collie should fall asleep in the cool angle under the back veranda hammock and should fail to awake again."
As I read some of these I began to wonder if they weren't stories that were told to her by her father, who was killed in a car wreck when she was 16, and if some of them aren't actually a legacy of dogs that he had before she was born, since some of the stories talk about sires and dams and are pretty factual for a nine year old girls imaginings. I won't ever know.
Then there are what seem to be actual journal writings - descriptions of days - cold, gray days, stormy days and once she wrote of an "apple green day": "Today was an apple green day. The sun was shining brightly as if ashamed of the way the weather has been for the past days. The shadows were just beginning to settle when I took Mickey and went exploring in the old orchard. The shadows fell though and we had to leave."
And as I thumb through the dry, yellow pages I start finding dates, so this journal encompasses a number of years and shows that my mother wrote in it sporadically (another trait I seem to have inherited!). Now I find an entry dated January 1947, followed by one dated December 1946. Both of these entries are dedicated to dogs.
And now, I find an entry written after she lost her father. She was barely sixteen years old. It is titled, simply, "My Dad" and is dated January 20, 1950. It reads:
"It's been a long, long time since I've written, almost three years now. My life has changed so much that I feel as though the Jeddy of yesterday, carefree, happy, dreamy little Jeddy was just a dream. Maybe a can put down on paper what I feel and ease the pain in my head.
Dad is gone now. Gone to a better land than this, I know. But I'll never, never forget my dad, for to me he was the greatest man in the world. I can still see him about 12:00 on Saturday afternoons, packing up the "old car" to go on one of his hunting or fishing trips. The old khaki pants on, a brown shirt, and an old straw hat. On these days, he was always happy for he was doing the thing he loved most in the world. Going on his beloved trips into the country. Maybe he was by himself, maybe not. Either way he was happy. It was his life and the life he loved most."
This is it - and it leaves me with questions. Does this answer some of the questions surrounding my mother's later problems? It sounds as if my grandfather left every weekend without his wife and daughter. I know that even back in those days families went on camping trips together, but it doesn't seem to have been the case here. I know that there were times when my grandmother had to warn my mother to stay away from him when he was out on the porch - days when he would sit out with a gun across his knees, obviously suffering from some mental disorder that he may have passed on to my mother. Did his passing leave her idolizing a man who was disappointed that he didn't have a son, scarring her in the process? I could go on and on coming up with more questions that will never be answered, but there are days when I wish that somewhere, part of the mystery would unlock.
