Margaret Ann Parker’s lifelong dream was to see her grandmother’s remarkable journey get the attention it deserved. But she didn’t find the time and dedication to publish the diaries until a few misfortunes changed her life — opening up the time and a new attitude, as well.
Parker, 65, was a full-time registered nurse until 1986, when she suffered a severe back injury on the job. That slowed her down some, but she kept at it part time, until a freak accident stopped that, too. It was hardly anything, she said, but it changed everything: She was walking her dog, tripped, landed hard on her forehead and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.
“I’ve gotten to the point with the head injury where I just don’t have the stamina and the concentration” for nursing work, Parker said. “I kept my license up until this year, but I very sadly let it go.”
Sadness didn’t overtake her, though — partially thanks to the example of her grandmother.
“Instead of sitting around doing nothing, I realized God had a plan for me and for these diaries. The whole thing became a big adventure for me.”
And for her young friend from church, 21-year-old Jordan Brown, an education major at the University of Portland, who agreed to help Parker organize and transcribe the diaries of Lida Beaty-Jackson.
Parker’s grandmother was born in 1881 and grew up in a “soddy” in west Kansas. Here’s her description of arriving there, a tired child at the end of a long pilgrimage from Indiana:
“Heartsick and dismayed, we viewed the ruins of our home. Some thief had stolen the center ridgepole that had supported the roof, along with the windows and doors and the frames of each; every scrap of wood about the place was gone. Roofless, the house stood there like a skeleton.”
“The Crazy Quilt of Life” is better than your standard self-published morass. It’s literate, visual, engaging reading that shows people making life for themselves despite tough odds: building a community school and wiping out a community of coyotes; enduring blizzards, prairie fires, rattlesnakes and running cattle; surprise birthday parties and deaths in childbirth; Lida’s college education, teaching career and marriage to a local newspaper editor who eventually went to work for a congressman and took his young family to Washington, D.C.
“My grandmother had such amazing writing skills,” said Parker, who lives in the Van Mall neighborhood. “It’s amazing to read all the things she endured in an optimistic way.”
But what’s left out must have been an amazing story too: Lida’s second marriage, to Edward Jackson — who became governor of Indiana in 1924.
“I would love to dig into that but I don’t know what happened” to any more Beaty-Jackson journals, Parker said. “Mom didn’t know either.”
You can find “The Crazy Quilt of Life” via online booksellers such as Amazon.com. Contact Parker at map.sunshine@comcast.net.
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