hen I go to visit my mother, it’s always an experience. She amazes me. She currently lives in a single-wide trailer on the farm where I grew up. And whenever I visit, she constantly talks about getting rid of stuff. She wants my sister to take all of the old family photographs. She wants my other sister to have the dolls she played with when she was little. She wants me to take the Corningware and other dishes. (She didn’t have to work very hard to convince me to take the Corningware. It’s the pretty blue cornflower pattern, and–most importantly–the various-sized pieces still have their lids, because my mother is VERY careful.)
The things my mother keeps
Yet in all of this downsizing and getting rid of all the stuff that she’s collected over her ninety years, she still managed to surprise me by pulling out a box that I’d never in my life seen before.
This time it was my Great (actually two greats) Aunt Lydia Koenig’s things. Aunt Lydia was the youngest sister of my great-grandmother Dora (Koenig) Emig, and of about a hundred other siblings. OK. Maybe just eight or so. Aunt Lydia never married, and she was a nurse. She worked in the hospital at Junction City, KS, and there’s family drama involved with the son of one of my uncles who was desperately ill. They took the little boy to the hospital where Aunt Lydia worked, but she wasn’t there at the time and they wouldn’t admit him for some reason, so they had to drive to the next town over. The little boy died. Robbie was his name, I believe. My cousin.
I’d heard the story, but it never registered to me how Aunt Lydia became a nurse. She’d been dead for over a decade by the time I was born, and I knew that Mom had a floor lamp that had belonged to her. And the dining room table. And maybe a chair… But this box!
Treasures in a cardboard box
Photographs. Some in albums with those little black photo corners and crumbling black paper and broken spines. Some in stiff cardboard frames with the name of the photography studio embossed in fancy script. Most just tucked in envelopes and with scarcely any information provided. “Me and Mary at the coast.” “Geo. Miller.” “Lou, Arlene and Phyllis.”
And then at the very bottom? The best thing someone like me can ever see. A journal. A writer can spot one a mile away. I froze when I caught sight of it, and gave the book a reverent moment of silence before I picked it up.
Aunt Lydia’s journal is black, with thin red canvas to contain its tiny three ring binding. The corners are worn and the binding is stiff, so that I could barely open it the first time, and when I did, the canvas immediately cracked. Biting my lip, I steeled myself. What’s more important? The fragility of the binding or the words inside? Foolish question.
The first page was hidden by newspaper clippings and a folded pieces of notepaper, but once I managed to peel those away, I could see the date at the top of the first page written in a beautiful, precise script.
Diary – Wed Sept 1 – 1915
Lydia Koenig
I left home on the 2:30 a.m. train, met Lou and Arlene at Chapman and we arrive in Kansas City about eight o’clock. We had breakfast at Thompson’s Cafeteria on Main and then proceeded on our way to the hospital…
And that was it. I was hooked.
Reading the journal for the first time
She wrote her diary as a record of her time at University Hospital at the corner of 10th and Campbell in Kansas City, Missouri. (And it wasn’t easy figuring that part out. Aunt Lydia can be stingy with her details. And unfortunately, the building isn’t there any more–it was torn down to make room for an entrance ramp onto the interstate.) Most of it is about her patients–what she learned that day and who she took care of–but once in a while you see the real Aunt Lydia. You hear the conversations she has with the doctors, experience her loneliness at being so far away from home in Solomon, KS, and deal with her frustrations with “smarty” other nurses-in-training.
I read late into the night on the old bed in my mom’s guest room–the journal propped up carefully with pillows so that I didn’t crack the binding any more than I already had, and gingerly turning pages so that they didn’t catch on the rings and tear. And when I finally did fall asleep, I dreamed about that hospital and those doctors and nurses and patients.
The Great Aunt Lydia Project had begun.