16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Sunday, November 12, 1911: Went to Sunday School this morning. Our Sunday School teacher is sick. This afternoon I gave Caroline a visit. But such a day to go calling. It rained and blew and hailed.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Brrr. . . . the weather sounds dreadful.
Caroline refers to Grandma’s friend Carrie Stout. She lived on a farm midway between the Muffly farm and McEwensville.
Friends, then as now, played an important role in adolescents’ lives. Here’s what a book published in 1911 had to say:
The boy seeks his chum and the girl her bosom friend into whose sympathetic ears hopes, fears, dreams, ambitions, and secrets are poured.
Boy and Girl (1911) by Emma Virginia Fish
I wonder what dreams, hopes, and ambitions Grandma shared with Carrie. And, if—as the years passed– Grandma fulfilled her dreams, or if they were dashed or forgotten.
Perhaps in some ways dreams are much the same as today, some come true and some must be let go…
How true!–Some do come true and others must be left go. . . and sometimes dreams just evolve over time.