Saturday

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Barrie and her dad went to Jackson today to watch the parade. When she got home, she said it was going to rain, so she grabbed the lawnmower and mowed the lawn. It rained just a bit, but I hope it will rain more. i don't know why, but grass seems to green up much more from the rain than it does with water from the well.

This is the reason I am not getting any painting done and am staying up too late. And it's all Alice's fault! She told me she had extra space in her bookshelves and wondered if I had any of the notebooks. Sure enough, I still had my mother's diary, and have started reading it again. She started it in 1948 when we moved to the homestead along the river between Riverton and Shoshoni. I was about 9 at the time, and don't even remember the hardships. We had no water, no electricity, no phone, no money, and lived about 15 miles from town. The land had just been cleared of sagebrush. I remember living a pretty carefree life, but my parents worked so hard, and my brothers were old enough to work pretty hard too.

She wrote about how cold it got, or how hot it got, and how bad the mosquitoes were. We took baths in the irrigation ditch. The machinery broke down, I think we did laundry in town, and mom would sometimes iron 21 shirts! She baked bread and sewed and mended and grew a huge garden and canned what she grew. Then the Shoshoni school needed a teacher so she went to work teaching first grade and drove the school bus. Sometimes old friends or relatives came to visit, maybe a dozen at a time, and would stay several days. Mom always had something to feed them, and made beds for them somewhere. We had lots of company, and of course they usually just showed up unexpected because they couldn't call us.

I estimate I have read 300 pages of the diary, so you can see by the photo how many pages it is. It is printed on both sides of the paper. Mom wrote by hand until later years when she got a word processor - then she typed it all.