I've been transcribing my great-grandfather's journal online for the past few months.  I finally got my mother over this evening in front of Google Earth to help me identify some geographic markers from his journal.  When reading about his farm land and melon patch I feel a little like I am reading about Winnie the Pooh to my children.  Milne includes a map of the 100 acre wood to help the reader orient himself.  I have the same need while reading the journals.  D.C. also has maps and bills and notes tucked in his journals (I'm starting to scan some of them).  They have rested there for three quarters of a century.  His journal also includes some sketches like this one of his beloved melon patch drawn on the first day of 1935:



Dreams of spring, no doubt.

The raw journals that I possess are between 45 to 75 years old.  They are in rough shape with the covers falling off and brittle pages but they are rich with a history I want to have.  I am transcribing 1935 right now.  I don't have an exact age for D.C. at their writing but he was approximately 60-years old in 1935.


In the above photo he is well into his 80's.  He died in 1969 at the age of 94.  I was five which seems odd because I have so many memories of him - sitting in his chair smoking a pipe or resting in his garden hammock that was stretched out under grape vines that shaded part of the garden behind his house on Sycamore Street:



I think that I can still smell that house.  The mixture of something cooking, Prince Albert pipe tobacco and old.  Even though I never saw the house after I was five. I can remember his chair on the right when entering the house.  Veer to the left after walking in and the dining room and kitchen shared the back of the house.  Through the kitchen and out the back door was the home garden where he spent lots of time even in his 90's gardening, making wine, reading and sleeping. 

But his true love was the land by the river where he hunted, gardened and farmed.



Here he built five houses to rent when he was 75 years old.  Here, as a man of 80, on hot summer afternoons he would stroll down to the banks of the Walhonding, strip off his clothes and cool off in the river waters.  At least until he shocked passersby who had no appreciation for the naked body of an 80 year old man.  Authorities asked my grandmother to talk to him about keeping clothes on.  He sadly complied, being an agreeable man.

He was a simple, frugal, well-educated man.  But what stands out about him as I type the words that he wrote is his outlook on life.  My mother said that he loved life always finding something positive in every situation.  It shines through in his writing.  I'm grateful to have an opportunity to preserve his words.