From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Today, I will write about yesterday, because I didn’t want to leave the room as long as Tante Bertha was here. I wish my Grandmother was just like her, but she isn’t. Grandmother is a very good woman. She is always telling everyone so, and if I have any doubts Alma says that everyone who knows my Grandmother knows that she is a very good woman. I have never heard Tante Bertha say that she is anything, but she laughs and smiles and seems like someone who couldn’t be bad. I think it is better to laugh and smile than to be good.

Tante Bertha lives in a tiny house and when we have visited there, her whole family were gathered in the kitchen, and they were teasing each other and having fun. No one seems to be serious and I never heard Tante Bertha scold. Of course I just visit once in a while. Well, all the girls have jobs and bring their money home except Edda. Edda is married to a nice man who has a pharmacy full of beautiful colored bottles and jars. Edda is the nicest one of the girls and I guess that is why she is married. Her husband’s name is Ignatz. There are two brothers too. One is named Henry; he ran away from home and joined the Navy. He came home with the prettiest pictures painted on his chest and on his arms too and they will never wash off. He showed them to me. There is a lovely green and orange mermaid, and a green and orange parrot, and a red rose, and a fan that has “Forget Me Not” written on it. Tante Bertha also has a husband. He is a nice man but he has very bad headaches. Grandfather says he seems to have them all of a sudden when he is winning at Poker, and then he stops playing. I think it is too bad he has them, and Tante Bertha treats him just like a little baby. She cooks special things for him, and keeps the house very quiet when he is not well. He told me that once when he went on a trip to Europe, that while he was there, he had a terrible headache, and so he went to a doctor. The doctor’s name was Dr. Knipe. I remember that because it rhymes with tripe, and I hate tripe. This doctor told him to go wading in cold water every morning before he had breakfast. So Uncle went wading every morning and the headaches went away. Then, when he came back to his home here, the headaches came back. In Europe he had a brook very near his house, but here, there was no brook, so he got up in the morning and threw buckets of water on the bathroom floor and went wading. He said that it should have worked just as well as it did in Austria, only the people who lived in the flat below were very angry, as the water leaked through to their rooms. That is why they have this tiny house that they are all crowded into now, because the landlord had to fix the leaks, and Uncle was very angry about it. He said that he came to America because it was a free country where a man should be able to do whatever he pleases in his own bathroom.