Today, I did something that I had been planning for a long time.
My mother left all my grandmother’s diaries and journals to me in her will. I had had them, along with a lot of other stuff from my mother and grandmother, in our storage room for a long time. But I didn’t know they were to be mine till after my mom died.
At one point, while my mom was still alive, I went through all the stuff she’d left with us when she moved back east and put it all in new boxes. She’d had to move in a hurry and a lot of things were just thrown into any old box she could find. I wanted them to be stored neatly and properly, and shipped back to her. At one point I talked with my youngest brother about getting them shipped, and sent quite a pile of new boxes with him, with that in mind.
Well, circumstances changed and the boxes stayed at my brother’s house. I was pretty sure there were three boxes of journals and I was pretty sure they all went with him. So, last time he and the family were coming to visit us, I asked if he could bring those boxes back.
He brought back two boxes, but only one had journals in it according to the label on the side (the other said it was manuscripts). It turned out that I had one box of journals still here in our storage room. We have a vintage glass-fronted bookcase in the bedroom and it had long been my goal to put the journals all in there, but quite a bit of other furniture reshuffling had to be done before that was possible.
So we’ve reshuffled, I moved the books that were in that bookcase, and went to open up the boxes of journals. The one my brother brought back had only a few journals in it. The rest was just miscellaneous books. I brought in the box from the storage room and found journals from 1940 to 1983 (the year Gran died). I know there is another box with pre-1940 journals in it. I wish I knew where that one went.
Good incentive to clean the storage room, and I guess I’d better check with my brother, too.
Although I’ve skimmed through several of the journals to find references to important family events, there’s a lot more that I haven’t explored. Reading her handwriting is going to be… fun. 🙂
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