Twenty Something
Opal Whiteley was 6 years old when she began keeping a diary, scrawling with a crayon in tightly spaced, phonetically spelled words.
She recorded her wanderings and wonderings in the woods of her Oregon logging community. She was prodded by her mother’s admonition to write about what, where, when, how and why, and she was grasping at the transcendent, describing a “Cathedral” of cedars.
“I hear songs — lullaby songs of the trees,” Opal wrote. “I am happy, listening to the twilight music of God’s good world. I’m real glad I’m alive.”
Opal stored her diary in a hollow log in the forest, maintaining it for six years. She felt a duty to document nature’s music, whispered by the wind “to folks to print for other folks.”
But heartbreak came at age 13, when her destructive younger sister found the diary and tore it to pieces. Opal collected the shreds and put them in a hatbox, tucked out of sight and mind for years.
As a young woman, Opal tried to launch a writing career and one day visited the Boston office of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. Charmed by her personality but unimpressed by her writing samples, the editor asked if Opal had kept a diary.
The hatbox was delivered promptly — some scraps as large as a half-sheet of notebook paper, many the size of a thumbnail. Opal spent nine months reassembling the diary, an undertaking the editor called “enormous” and “methodical.”
“First, the framework of a sheet would be fitted and the outer edges squared,” the editor wrote. “Here the adornment of borders in childish patterns and the fortunate fact that the writer had employed a variety of colored crayons, using each color until it was exhausted, lent an unhoped-for aid.”
The entire process guts me: the destruction, the restoration. Painstaking, bleary-eyed work.
Beginning in March of 1920, the first two years of Opal’s diary were serialized in the magazine, billed as “a revelation of the spirit of childhood” and a balm for Americans disillusioned by the recent war in Europe.
It was a hit.
Come September, the excerpts were published as a book.
Opal had heeded advice that I think of often as a Catholic, as a writer, as a seeker of wonder — three “instructions for living a life” from the poet Mary Oliver: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
That is our work this season, when each falling leaf gives permission to change, to weep, to let go. “Behold!” we proclaim. “God makes all things new” (Rev 21:5).
We send postcards from the road. We share revelations from the back pew. We light candles and we kneel, we confess and we listen.
When I think of the cornerstone Catholic belief that all people have inherent dignity, I picture Opal’s diary, reassembled piece by piece. A story worth telling. A little girl who still matters.
This is what our Heavenly Father does for each of us: taking our discarded bits and piecing them together, making a masterpiece of our scraps. This is what Catholics are called to do for each other: Encountering a mess and seeing the promise, we take great care with the smallest of parts.
It is hard, holy work.
Christina Capecchi is a freelance writer from Inver Grove Heights, Minn.
