My grandmother's journals provide reflection, inspiration

I think by now, you may have surmised that I am an only child. I've mentioned both my mother and my father throughout my columns. Now I'd like to introduce you to the fourth member of my family household, my grandmother Ella May McCabe Rickards. She had come to live with us before I was born. We were fellow soulmate Scorpions, both born Nov. 5, but in different eras.

She wanted to be a writer, I think, but could never seem to generate original ideas. But write she did! She would sit at her blue desk in her bedroom and write. The shelves in the secretary-style desk were filled with 50 or so diaries she kept daily for that many years. There was busy floral wallpaper on all sides of the room, even on the ceiling! Maybe that's why I love busy patterns to this day.

The daily entries usually went like this, "Played cards," and most importantly, "Played bingo." They portray a simpler, friendlier time when people would drop by to spend the evening. Hence, "The Martin Blacks dropped by," and "Played cards with friends; won $1.46."

She'd come home and pay my tariff. I'd sit at the bottom of the hallway steps, and she'd hand me some of her winnings – compensation for valuable time away from her funny, warm presence. Or maybe it was for the Saturday evenings as my designated babysitter when I would accompany her to the fire hall, but was required to sit in the little room reserved for children on Bingo Game Night. It was very spare, with a black-and-white TV set on top of cinder blocks. The calls of B9, G63 were blaring in the background! Her journals recorded all of her winnings.

She was a crafter, too. Crocheting bottle caps with colored embroidery thread and forming them into coasters that mimicked bunches of grapes, covering boxes with seashells from Florida, and weaving plaited rugs out of plastic bread wrappers were all part of her repertoire.

Her diaries were simple and prosaic: "Ironed today," and the rare comment about her husband (my grandfather), "Steve came in." Steve Rickards was also known as "The Bean King." He rode up and down the East Coast from NYC to Florida promoting produce for The Pinto Brothers. I never dug too deeply as to who they really were – better not to know too much! In any event, she spent a lot of her marriage alone with her daughter, Marguerite, who was my mother.

One Florida entry in her journal said, "It's New Year's Eve. I'm by myself looking at the stars. Steve came in." According to another entry, once when she and Steve were coming home from Florida, there was a police roadblock. The Bean King placed her in the driver's seat because she had a driver’s license and he did not. She woke up to a cop demanding, "Lady, why don't you have your headlights on?"

They often had to leave town fast! It was like a scene from the old 1970s movie "Paper Moon." Another time she was drying clothes on some bushes along the road. The Bean King decided it was time to go, waking up from a quick nap. She gathered her clothes up quickly. As they rode along, cars passed with people laughing and pointing. Her pink bloomers were caught in the back window, ballooning out for all to see!

That was the funniest entry. There are landmark entries as well. The day I was born and the day I left for college are two. Then there was the one ... "I felt a chill today, like a rabbit jumped over my grave." She died three weeks later, and the entries stopped. I was far away in New Mexico at the time. I've searched for her grave near Selbyville since that terrible day, and found both her and my grandfather lying side-by-side – Steve and Ella are now together for all eternity, at long last.

The diaries she purchased from the Wanamaker department store are also filled with relics. Ads for rickets, fashions from the flapper days of the 1920s, and medical tonics. She had read the Bible 17 times and had been planning to copy the whole thing when she died, even though she was not overtly religious. She had recipes for fruit cake, and even made me like it – sort of. There is one volume devoted to old newspaper articles about Eleanor Roosevelt's life. She spoke at my mother's college graduation from Temple University in 1938.

I wish now that I had kept a journal for as long as she did, but I'm writing now – and she was my inspiration.