Medora, 1915

My Aunt Medora has been gone more than a hundred years now.  Yet, sometimes I wonder what she might have been doing on this month and day when she was living.  According to her diary, this is what she was doing on March 29,1915:

I am really home and sitting on the edge of Willard’s bed that has been everything from a boat to a forest full of bears, in the dear old shabby nursery.  I love this old old-fashioned house with all its nooks and corners that are so very hard to clean – I arrived safely in Nahcotta Saturday morning.  It seemed so funny to see all the business buildings gone… I found Sue up and well though still thin and weak.  She doesn’t do anything about the house but amuses herself all day which is so different…scrubbed the kitchen and dining room thoroughly but that is all I really accomplished.

Suzita Espy, c. 1920

It’s odd to read her words all these years later.  Less than a year after she wrote these thoughts she died in her sleep at her boarding house at the Portland Academy.  Willard, who was five when she sat on the edge of his bed that Monday morning, would lead a complicated, fulfilling life and would immortalize their beloved Oysterville.  Sue, just recovering from pneumonia, would become a flapper, marry a rum runner and leave two young children when she once again contracted pneumonia and, this time, died – also in Portland.

This “old old-fashioned house with all its nooks and corners” is still “so very hard to clean” and Nahcotta never did recover completely from the fire that swept through the town in January 1915.  I can’t help but envy her sixteen-year-old energy – scrubbing the kitchen and the dining room “thoroughly” sounds like an overwhelming chore to me.  Sorry to say, the thought isn’t very inspirational.

Medora’s Diary, August 1914

I’m grateful I have her diaries and letters. (Actually, copies.  The originals are at the Washington State Historical Society Research Center in Tacoma.)  Sometimes it just seems nice to check in with the past.  Especially with someone as grounded as Medora.  I wonder who the people a hundred years from now will be checking back with.  Do teenagers write diaries anymore?