Eliza Bertram was born in 1881 in the town of Stuart, Iowa, and died there in 1955. She taught fourth and fifth grade at the Stuart Public School for thirty-eight years.

She kept a diary from January 1, 1923, until December 18, 1954. The complete manuscript is four thousand eight hundred and twelve pages long, in twenty-six cloth-bound notebooks, currently held in the State Historical Society of Iowa in Iowa City.

I spent four days with the notebooks in March. I had requested them not knowing what I would find.

The first thing I found was that Bertram wrote every day. Not most days. Every day. Including the day she had pneumonia in 1934 and the day her sister died in 1947 and the day, in 1952, when a tornado removed half of the roof of her house.

The second thing I found was that she did not write about herself.

The diary contains, almost exclusively, observations of other people. The boy who delivered the milk. The woman who ran the post office. The students in her classroom. The man who fixed her stove. The crow that nested in the elm behind the schoolhouse for nine consecutive years.

Bertram describes them in careful, unhurried prose. She uses their full names when she knows them. She uses descriptions when she does not.

She does not pass judgment. She records.

The entry for March 4, 1931, reads, in part: Mr. Halversen at the hardware brought in a new shipment of nails. He stacked them in the wrong order. He realized this at three in the afternoon and restacked them, looking annoyed but not, I think, with himself.

The entry for September 18, 1939, reads, in part: The Hochstetter girl came to school without her lunch. She did not say why. I gave her half of mine. She ate it slowly, as if she were saving some for later, but there was no later.

“The entry for September 18, 1939, reads, in part: The Hochstetter girl came to school without her lunch.”

The entry for August 6, 1945, reads only: The radio said Hiroshima. I made bread. The bread rose properly.

Bertram never married. She lived with her sister, Anna, until Anna's death, and then alone. She had, as far as the diary records, two close friends: another teacher named Miriam Vogel, and the town librarian, a woman named Adelaide Brace.

Miriam and Adelaide are mentioned often, but always in passing, in the same registers Bertram uses for the milk delivery boy. The diary does not distinguish her intimates from her acquaintances.

This is, I came to think, the diary's central decision. Bertram does not arrange her town into circles of importance. Everyone in Stuart is described with the same attention.

The mailman gets the same care as Miriam Vogel. The crow gets the same care as both.

I read the diary in roughly chronological order, skipping ahead at points. I made a list, by the second day, of the people who recurred. The list was three pages long. Bertram had written about, at minimum, four hundred and forty individuals.

Some of them she had written about for thirty years. The milkman in 1923 was a boy named Cyril Boudreaux. He delivered milk for nine years. He then moved to Des Moines. He returned, in 1948, to bury his father. Bertram noted his return. She also noted that he looked tired and that his hair had gone gray at the temples.

The diary does not, in any conventional sense, have a plot. It has a town. The town accumulates.

By 1950, when the diary has been going for twenty-seven years, the reader (this reader, at least) knows Stuart, Iowa in a way one does not know any place one has not lived.

I knew where the icehouse had stood before it burned in 1936. I knew which streets flooded in the spring. I knew that the Methodist minister in 1942 had a habit of clearing his throat three times before each sermon.

I knew that Adelaide Brace, the librarian, had begun in 1938 to wear a particular blue sweater on Wednesdays, and that she continued to wear it on Wednesdays until 1954, when Bertram stopped writing.

The diary ends mid-sentence. The entry for December 18, 1954, begins: The snow this morning was the kind that comes in small, dry flakes, the kind that

There is nothing after that. Bertram had a stroke that afternoon. She lived another nine months but did not write again.

The archivist who oversees the collection is a woman named Hannah Verlst. She told me that the diary is requested, on average, eleven times a year, mostly by genealogists looking for ancestors.

She told me that no one, to her knowledge, had ever read it cover to cover. The diary is four thousand eight hundred pages. It would take, she estimated, three to four months of full-time reading.

She told me she had read parts of it, here and there, for fifteen years. She said the parts had begun to add up.

I asked her what she thought Bertram had been doing.

She thought for a while. She said: "I think she was the only person in that town who was paying attention to everyone. I think she knew that. I think she thought someone should."

I have not stopped thinking about this. I do not know yet what to do with it. The diary sits in Iowa City. Most of it has never been read.