18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Friday, July 25, 1913: Not worth writing about.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Since I knew my grandmother when she was much older than the teen in the diary, I’m constantly trying to reconcile how the young Helena in the diary evolved into the grandma I knew.
Since it was a slow day a hundred years ago today, I’m going to share a memory that I have of Grandma as an older woman—when she actually was my grandmother.
—
Every year when the hydrangeas bloom I think of Grandma. I can remember playing with my cousins—and seeing Grandma “watering” her hydrangeas with a can filled with something that wasn’t water.
I ran over and asked what she was doing . She explained how she needed to add aluminum sulfate to the soil to make the hydrangeas blue.
I couldn’t understand how a flower could possibly change colors depending upon what was put on the soil—so I asked a zillion questions. And, I remember Grandma carefully and patiently answering each one.
In many ways this story is very typical of many of my memories of Grandma. When I was a small child Grandma always welcomed questions and treated each question with respect.
When I was a youngster, she treated me like an older person than almost anyone else I knew—but I always understood her answers and really liked that she knew that I was big enough to understand what she was saying when she explained complex things to me.
