Dear Diaries

This summer has been busy. My fall calendar is filling up quickly too. Winter seems far enough away, but my to-do list for the indoor season already has several new entries...along with the items I didn't get to last year.

One of the new items is to go through my grandmother's diaries. For years she kept brief daily notes about her life--what she and my grandfather did, who they saw, or what the weather was like. A few of the years are documented in proper diaries, but most of them are the free calendars that used to be given out by business like banks, farmers co-ops, or insurance agencies.

There are two decades of them, the earliest of which is from 1961.