16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Monday, January 22, 1912: Ruth and I went up to Oakes’ this evening. I didn’t care very much about going as I had my lessons to study and don’t do so much as it is.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Brrr. . . it sounds like a cold walk in the dark.
Grandma and her sister Ruth would have walked down the road that went past their house to the farm where their friend Rachel Oakes lived.
Rachel’s brothers, Alvin and James, may have also been there. The previous spring Ruth dated James—but he hasn’t been mentioned in the diary in months, so I don’t think that they were still dating.
