In June 2021 I happened upon a page-a-day diary from 1923 at a local antique shop. Because I’m both a nosey (curious) bitch and a sucker for the quotidian, I bought it ($28), brought it home, and worked on and off for the next two and a half years to transcribe every entry, making note as I went of the people, places, and events the diarist documented. Earlier this year I finally finished the task of transcribing and began the work of piecing together context clues to figure out the identity of the diarist.

While every page of the diary is thoroughly filled (and most days include a brief weather report at the top of the page), it contains no direct information about the identity of who wrote it: the diarist didn’t write their name anywhere in it, nor did they acknowledge their birthday or provide any other direct clues about their identity. They did, however, include plenty of information about their husband’s identity: his name, his profession, his birthday, and their wedding anniversary. She—given the time and the information available to me, I correctly assumed that the diarist was a woman—also named a few relatives who lived nearby and with whom she and her husband spent much time, as well as her husband’s business partner. This was plenty of information for me to easily and quickly figure out who she was. Or, rather, to figure out her name: Marie Howell (née Cline).

When I first found the diary, my plan was to transcribe the entire thing before the end of 2022 and then, to mark its centennial, post a page a day on one social media platform or another beginning January 1, 2023. Then life happened and my plan…didn’t.

When I picked this project back up at the start of this year and finally figured out the name of the diarist, I did so by cross-referencing a handful of different records and documents—including the diarist’s and her husband’s death certificates, which list each other as each other’s spouses (shout out to my library card and the extremely free access it provides me to Ancestry Library Edition, HeritageQuest, and Oregon newspaper archives dating back to the 1850s). And that’s how I learned the diarist and her husband—Marie and Dwight Howell—are entombed together at an historic Portland mausoleum not far from my apartment. (Let’s be real. Portland is small. Basically everything is ~not far from my apartment.~)

Transcribing Marie’s diary and researching the people, places, and events documented in it has been one of the most enjoyable endeavors I’ve undertaken. It’s sent me on so many side quests and down so many research rabbit holes (two of my favorite activities!). I’ve learned an incredible amount of information about how to research, about what city life was like for a white woman married to a white man with a white-collar job in Portland in the early twentieth century, about urban planning and how land is surveyed and mapped (and why Sandy Boulevard cuts diagonal like that), about what Portland used to look like and how it used to function, and about the early history of the Willamette Valley (as we know it today) as settlers began to arrive and stake claims to land that didn’t belong to them.

Stumbling upon this diary truly turned out to be such an unexpected and special gift—it’s always so exciting and humbling to be reminded of how much I still have to learn—and I wanted to do something for Marie to express my gratitude. So, I brought her (and Dwight) some flowers.

Marie wrote several times in her diary that year about her and Dwight’s dahlias. Twice she mentioned red dahlias specifically.

Sunday, June 17, 1923. “We arose for all day at 8. Cold baths. Eats at 9:15. At 9:30 Clayton phoned that Gladys has a tooth-ache. They came over. In mean time Dwight & I had made the house look pretty good. After they arrived Dwight & Clayton trimmed & weeded the dahlias.”

Tuesday, July 24, 1923. “We were up at 5:30. Mush and started on our way at 7. Some sun-of-a-gun picked our fancy dahlias that were only half bloomed yesterday.”

Tuesday, Sept. 4, 1923. “Breakfast at 7. Then cut the most wonderful bunch of red dahlias.”

Thursday, Sept. 6, 1923. “Up at 6:30. Left home at 8:15. Picked dahlias before leaving.”

Friday, Sept. 7, 1923. “We arose at 6. Cold baths & breakfast. Had sprinkler going until we started to city. Dwight cut a few dahlias, did up our dishes, left home at 7:45.”

Thursday, Oct. 18, 1923. “We were up at 6. Eats 7:15. Office at 8. Took a nice bunch of red dahlias.”

Friday, Oct. 19, 1923. “We were about ready to start but went into yard & tied up 3 bunches of dahlias the wind had blow over.”

Monday, Oct. 22, 1923. “Up at 6. The paper came while I was lighting up, so we read for a short time while rooms were getting warm. Dwight picked a large bunch of dahlias for the office.”

Tuesday, Oct. 30, 1923. “We were up at 6:30. Eats 7:30. Left home 7:45. I gathered a few dahlias to take along.”

Sunday, Nov. 18, 1923. “After breakfast we did up our work & cleaned some [illegible] into yard and took up our dahlias. Put them in basement. Raked up leaves.”

* * *

I don’t know if dahlias in general or red ones in particular were as beloved by Marie as my brain has convinced me they were. It seems like a reasonable assumption that they were: Aside from a single mention of gladiolas, it’s the only flower she writes about, and she does so repeatedly. So, I decided to bring her a bouquet of red dahlias—a custom and stunning arrangement very graciously made by a fellow athlete at the gym where I train who is a very talented flower farmer and florist.

Before brining the bouquet to Marie, I took an embarrassing number of photos and videos of it to try to capture its beauty. None of them did it any justice. This thing was STUNNING.

I really tried my best, okay! Please excuse my dusty-ass car, okay! And yes! That’s a plastic protein shaker bottle being used as a temporary vase, leave me alone about it!

Anyway. I hope Marie, who died 63 years ago today, would’ve appreciated this bouquet of red dahlias as much as I appreciate the gift she unwittingly gave me.

* * *

Shout out to the entire staff of Wilhelm’s Portland Memorial, all of whom who were so helpful, hospitable, and gracious with their time (that’s autistic for “they let me autistic monologue (infodump) their ears off”) when I stopped in earlier this week.