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In her diaries, my grandmother would note signs of the seasons changing.

Marking Her Days With Grace

In my Grandma Smith’s diaries, each sparse entry starts with a weather report. A true farmer, she always recorded the weather, both the high and low temperatures and noteworthy conditions like sheer wind or a blinding snowstorm. Farmers depend on the weather, so marking its changes helped her remember the years, but in rural North Dakota, the weather meant something more: it determined the possibilities of each moment and the strength needed to endure the extremes of life on the prairie.

Some days in July, she would just write “Hot.”

Another series of weather entries in 1966 reads like a poem:

Wed, March 9: 45 degrees above

snow melting

just like spring

Thurs, March 10: No need for a weather report.

Fri, March 11: Weather is fine.

My favorite weather entry reads: Sat, Jan 29, 1966: This morning it’s 40 below so won’t be very warm today. Even in a North Dakota winter, that could be considered an understatement.

In my grandmother’s make-do world, “Won’t be very warm” means “Won’t be going anywhere today.” My grandparents lived in the country, so snowstorms meant no trips to town and no visitors dropping by until the weather cleared. I can imagine my grandmother watching the wide winter-gray sky from the kitchen windows while she baked her weekly loaves of bread. She was a slim woman who in her later years never seemed to get warm. For her last Christmas, we gave her a heavy Scandinavian sweater to take away the chill. After she died, I inherited the sweater but I’ve never worn it; I don’t want to lose the smell of her face powder lingering in the thick wool.

Winter in North Dakota is unforgiving. An incautious mistake—an empty fuel tank, bad tires, turning down the wrong dirt road—can mean death in a blizzard that shrouds the prairie in icy white. And winter stays into spring there, as my grandmother’s diary confirms.

Fri March 4, 1966: 12 degrees above hi for today. It’s nice here today but not so warm. Is close to zero. We were lucky to miss being in the storm the last three days. Some lives lost in S. Dakota. I baked a pie.

Here and on the next page, my grandmother tucked two newspaper clippings about the days-old storm. “Snows Wrath on Our Path” warns one. “Holy Cow! No Snowplow!” exclaims the second.

Luckily, my grandparents missed that blizzard and got to town so my cousin could try on the dress of “tissue gingham” our grandmother had been sewing for her. But, my grandmother admits again in her understated way, “The wind was so howling, I didn’t like it.” With those words, I can see her watching the sky for snow and waiting for the roads to clear so that she could venture into town to visit family and buy supplies, perhaps even some fabric for my Easter dress in Colorado.

Rereading my Grandma Smith’s diaries, I look for clues about how she spent her days. She sewed continually and she baked a lot of bread—six or seven loaves at a time. She kept her flour in a deep pullout bin in the kitchen cabinet that held a fifty-pound bag. She would bake once a week, making enough for morning toast, noon sandwiches, and evening bread and butter. Covered by thin cotton dishtowels embroidered with vegetable people or sunbonnet girls, her loaves rose high in their pans.

Sometimes she would make cinnamon rolls along with the bread, letting the grandchildren roll out the rectangle of dough and spread it with real butter from our uncle’s creamery. Then we would spoon on brown sugar and sprinkle the dough with cinnamon, roll it up tight, pinch the seam, slice it into a dozen thick rounds, and pack them carefully in the cake pan to rise. Fresh and hot from the oven, the sugar- and butter-filled rolls melted on our fingers and tongues. No “store-boughten” cinnamon rolls could ever taste as good.

Grandma Smith worked hard on the farm, even after she and my grandfather weren’t raising animals and crops anymore. A typical entry of her busy life reads:

Tues, Feb 11, 1966:

I baked 2 apple pies

put in freezer

scrubbed the kitchen floor

fed the cats at the barn

burned the paper

this pm I’m going out visiting.

I remember my grandmother down on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor in case someone stopped by. I marveled that she wore dresses around the house with her old pantyhose, not wanting to waste a brand new pair. When I asked her why she didn’t just go barelegged, she exclaimed in disapproval, “No, I can’t do that!” She was fashionable her entire life, even when scrubbing the floor.

Because the Smith farm was on the highway into Williston, the county seat, many of my grandparents’ farming friends and relatives would stop by unannounced for coffee on their way to or from town. In her diaries, Grandma Smith noted who had visited that day and what she had baked—lemon meringue pie, angel food cake, or a kind of date cookie she called “Matrimonial Chews.” Visitors were so common at the farm that one entry comments on not receiving guests: Sat, March 9, 1985: I was home all day. Baked a pie but no company.

My grandmother rarely noted her feelings or reflections about her life, but one of the few reflective passages she wrote makes me laugh: Tues, Jan 25, 1966: I’m cleaning the basement—and it sure looks better. That “sure” sounds just like her, a mix of practicality and positive thinking. If you’re going to do something, it seems to say, do it right—and be happy you’ve done it.

Why weren’t her diaries more personal, more revealing of her thoughts and feelings? I don’t think she worried about someone discovering them. After her death, we found these few diaries stuck in an old cabinet in the basement, more tucked away for safekeeping than hidden. I think instead that she didn’t feel a need to express personal feelings in diary form. What was important was recording the everyday events of her life, keeping track of the weather and the visitors, the comings and goings of a farm on the edge of town.

In a few entries, though, I catch a glimpse of a more private side of my grandmother, moments of the solace she found in the natural world. In her diaries, she would note signs of the seasons changing, especially when a long, cold winter was turning away for spring:

Wed, April 6, 1983: We walked to the creek and found mayflowers and heard a meadowlark sing.

Tues, April 12, 1983: No snow yet. Cleaned house. Saw a meadowlark today. Gophers are running around and also saw a pheasant and two rabbits.

In entries like these, I imagine her looking out the window over the prairie, although “prairie” is my word, not hers. She would say “pasture,” since the long grass is where my grandparents grazed their cattle. I picture her walking to the creek to look for mayflowers, grateful for a sign that spring had finally made its way to the north. She paid attention to the creatures around her because they inhabited the same piece of land. She marked her days by the weather and the seasons because they formed the backdrop of her life on the farm, determining each day’s possibilities. These diary entries reveal an intimacy with nature that seems a private part of my grandmother’s life, quiet moments of grace in the midst of her busy days.

In North Dakota, the monotony of the prairie is broken only where the horizon yields corn or wheat or sunflowers. Trees only grow along rivers and creeks or in long-rowed breaks planted to protect farmhouses from the fierce Canadian wind. Against the prairie’s cornsilk-green and yellow chaff, my grandmother planted flowers in blazing swathes emboldening the landscape from the country roads running east of the farm. My grandmother grew what she called “the front row flowers”—gladiolas, sweet peas, zinnias, and poppies—in front of the steps along the highway-facing side of the farmhouse and in crocks on the outdoor steps. Whenever she watered her flowers, a few drops would leak from the spigot onto the mint that grew in a metal ring underneath. Because water was in such short supply, keeping a little mint alive in the ominous North Dakota heat was my grandmother’s way of beating the prairie.

When I turned fifty, my mother sent me a black and white photo of myself as a baby in my grandmother’s lap on those very steps. In the picture, I’m not looking at the camera; instead, I’m reaching for the pinwheel petunias in the old flower-pot sitting next to me, too tempting not to touch.

Reaching for the flower is one of my grandmother’s legacies to me. Planting the gladiola bulbs as soon as the ground can be worked each spring on my own farm, I think of my grandmother and her persistent attempts to stand out against the prairie. When I dig up the bulbs in fall’s slanting light to store over the winter, I think again of her hard work baking bread, butchering chickens, and putting by all the food her family would need.

But the real hardship for my grandmother, I think, was the isolation of her rural life, especially in the long winters. No wonder she baked every day in the happy chance that someone would visit. No wonder her diary celebrates the first mayflowers and meadowlark call of the spring.