Aunt Ruthie's HOT, HOT! Diary

#7 in My Family History

Is it hot where you live right now? Cool? Just right?

It’s hot in Florida, but that’s not unusual for June.

In Pennsylvania, my childhood home, June was warm but seldom hot. My Aunt Ruthie tells a different story about June 1945.

Thermometer from my father, Ray M. Longenecker’s, farm equipment business

Excerpts from Aunt Ruthie’s 1945 diary

As I leafed through Aunt Ruthie’s 1945 diary, four consecutive entries beginning with the word HOT! caught my eye.

An elementary school principal during for nine months of the year, Ruthie spent summers helping my dad at the shop, making something from wood (a shelf? a bookcase?) and for two weeks of the summer, she taught Bible school at Bossler Mennonite Church.

Ruthie says she wrote a letter to Naomi, indicating the way most people kept friendships alive with people they didn’t see often. She mowed her lawn of almost an acre. Power mowers had just become available in the mid-1940s, but she probably used a push mower. Well-manicured green grass was the only respectable thing Ruthie permitted in her front yard, her pride and chore.

On the 14th, I’m surmising Grandma helped her can some cherries she bought at the Masonic Homes and Orchard in Elizabethtown, PA.

Born in 1918, Aunt Ruthie, a Mennonite, was in her 20s when she wrote these diary entries. She looked like this back then:

My Observation

I have an image of her walking around the house, with the yellow Dixon-Ticonderoga pencil slotted at an angle between her ear and hair. It’s often baffling and sometimes infuriating that she wrote mostly in pencil, a wood-encased core of graphite and clay. But with magnification, her cursive penmanship is readable. Did you notice? She wore a sweater on July 11, a day she labeled as Hot!

A Discovery

This week I read some gripping statistics:

The world population in 1945 registered just over 2 billion. In 2025, the population on the planet hovers around 8.3 billion, over four times greater.

The impact on our planet is huge: more people, more factories, more cars ~ overall, a larger carbon footprint. Could this be part of the reason for extreme weather conditions we are experiencing?

Your Turn

• Is it hot where you live?

• How do you explain weather patterns in your area?

• How do you cope with extremes in temperature?