Sweet Olive Heirloom

The written word has always been important to Carley Fuller and her mother, Hydie Wahlborg. 

When Hydie was growing up in Natchez, she frequently visited her maternal grandparents, Walter and Annie Coleman, better known as Bumps and Fronnie. They had four daughters—Helen, Ann, Katherine, and Pendleton (called Penny), who is Hydie’s mother.

“My grandparents kept ledgers, the kind used for recording expenses,” said Hydie during a recent visit at Carley’s Baton Rouge home, where the two work together at their new business Sweet Olive Heirloom.

“Their earliest ledger was dated 1961 to 1963, and the second was dated 1964—both before I was born. 

“Both my grandparents wrote in the ledgers. We see my grandfather’s handwriting the most, but there are also entries written by my mother and her sisters. This is what intrigued me when I read them. It felt like I was stepping back in time with my mother and aunts as teenagers and my grandparents as young adults.  Each story of ordinary daily life feels like a treasured gift directly from the past.   

[Read about family heirlooms with historical heft in Dear Diaries]

“My mother was eleven when they moved to the country right outside of Natchez.  My grandfather wanted their time there to be documented by the family. When they told a story, he would always tell them to write it down. He often quoted Francis Bacon, ‘Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.’

“My mother always speaks of ‘porch memories.’ She says the back screened porch ran the length of the house and was twelve feet wide. They spent a lot of time there, snapping green beans from the garden. She remembers my grandfather, Bumps, coming home from work and sitting in his rocking chair on the porch, talking about the day’s events.

“He kept a stack of spiral-bound notebooks next to his chair his whole life. They were simply notes about everything he thought about. You might see four pages about chess. I remember going to the A&P with my grandmother, and she’d buy them for him.

“In middle school, I had to do a paper on Socrates. Bumps said, ‘You don’t need to go to the library. Sit down.’ Without even opening a book, he gave me all the information I needed. He was always reading.”

Among the books Bumps read were the novels of William Faulkner, with whom he developed a friendship while attending law school at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

“According to my mother, Faulkner was on the Ole Miss campus a lot,” said Hydie. “My grandfather approached him one day and launched into his thoughts on Faulkner’s recent book. Faulkner said, ‘Walk with me,’ and that was the first of many walks. They would end up at Faulkner’s house, sit on his porch swing, and talk about his books and the characters.”

Hydie realized early the importance of her grandparents’ ledgers and notebooks. “I wanted to read every word. I remember when I was in the fifth or sixth grade thinking, ‘I really need to listen to his stories.’” 

Bumps and Fronnie also saved letters he had written home when he was stationed in Morocco during World War II. “My mother still has cards my grandfather drew. When writing home during the war, he would draw his own cards and then write on them. When his fellow soldiers realized how talented he was, they asked him to draw a cartoon mural.”

It felt like I was stepping back in time with my mother and aunts as teenagers and my grandparents as young adults.  Each story of ordinary daily life feels like a treasured gift directly from the past.   

One such card, from Christmas Eve, 1944, is a pen-and-ink drawing of his desktop, with a jumble of books, and a rectangle that he filled in as his letter home. “He was both an artist and a writer,” said Hydie. “He drove to New Orleans every Saturday for years to study with the famous painter John McCrady. I remember him saying, ‘It’s impossible to paint a portrait if you don’t know anatomy.’”

Penny, the youngest Coleman daughter, married Pat Murphy, and they had two children: Hydie and her brother Reily. “My parents did not keep the same style ledger, but we were always encouraged to ‘write it down,’” said Hydie. “My mother wrote on everything—napkins, random slips of paper, the pages of books. I can open almost any book at my parents’ house and something she wrote will slip out—thoughts, poetry, memories, short stories, daily happenings. 

“Carley and I plan to fill a ledger with all of these treasures, along with stories that she tells us. She is an outstanding story-teller.”  Hydie moved from Natchez to Baton Rouge when she married John Wahlborg. When their third child was born in 1999, Hydie realized that she should keep ledgers for her children. She found one at a bookstore and began filling it with the small moments of everyday life. 

Carley was six when her mother started her own family ledger. The first entry describes Carley “digging for worms in the zinnia bed” and lists plants for the summer garden, including “one tomato sucker that Carley insists will grow.”

“She was right, by the way!” said Hydie with a smile.

“I was eight or nine when I started writing in the ledger,” Carley recalled. “It was always accessible to me. I can look back and read that I wrote, ‘I found a four-leaf clover with my sister.’ The daily moments were important, but I definitely would not remember them without the ledgers.” 

When Carley married Hudson Fuller in February 2016, Hydie wanted to give her something special. “I didn’t have any old pieces of fine jewelry,” said Hydie. “But that’s not necessarily what an heirloom is.” 

“She was looking for something meaningful to pass on,” said Carley “That’s when we decided to start the business.”

“I was moving to Fort Worth, where my husband was a football coach at Texas Christian University. We decided it was time to figure out a way to share the tradition. 

[Keeping antique and vintage linens in good shape: Sodium Perborate and Old Lace]

“The business was something we had always dreamed and talked about. For six months before I got married, I lived with my parents and grandparents. We’d talk over coffee in the morning, all three generations of women. It was like the perfect storm, three generations brainstorming. We thought, ‘We can actually do this as a business.’”

In Texas, Carley continued her day job, working with her mom for the organization Girls on the Run, a non-profit encouraging healthy lifestyles in preteen girls. She also began researching ideas for the business, which they named Sweet Olive Heirloom in honor of Fronnie.

“My grandmother was Miss Natchez in 1939, when she was a senior in high school,” said Hydie. “Her scrapbooks have dance cards and corsages in them. Sweet olive was her favorite tree. When she died, we scattered her ashes around the tree at my parents’ house in Natchez.”

“Her scrapbooks have dance cards and corsages in them. Sweet olive was her favorite tree. When she died, we scattered her ashes around the tree at my parents’ house in Natchez.”

Most important was finding a bindery that could make the books. “We wanted to keep the name The Ledger,” said Carley. “We found the bindery Thomson-Shore in Michigan to make them for us. The ledger measures 7.25 by 12 inches. It has a gray or green linen cover and 200 unlined pages of heavy, cream-colored paper. They are Smyth sewn so the pages will lie flat when the book is open.” The spine of each ledger includes the initials DeJ, for Bumps’s middle name, DeJarnette.

Carley’s own first ledger was a prototype made by the bindery. She and Hudson keep it on their coffee table and invite friends and family to write in it. In Fort Worth, Carley took a class in calligraphy so she could personalize each ledger with the family name and a quotation. “We package each one, the two of us in our home. In each package we include a bookmark with some prompts, such as ‘What memory makes you laugh?’”

Carley and Hudson recently moved back to Baton Rouge, where Hudson is the offensive coordinator for the football team at Catholic High School. Carley works with Hydie at Girls on the Run—and now at Sweet Olive Heirloom.

“The ledgers have become popular wedding gifts as a couple starts their life together,” said Carley. “Each one may take years to fill. We believe it’s a powerful tradition. We’re honoring the past and carrying it into the future.” 

For more about the ledgers as well as the new line of framed botanicals, visit sweetoliveheirloom.com. Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. 

This article originally appeared in our June 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.