100 Year Old Who Journaled Everyday

Woman, 100, has journaled every day for 90 years: ‘No excuse for me not to’

In 1935, 10-year-old Evie Riski’s father gifted her a diary for Christmas and marked the start of a 90-year journey for the North Dakota native.

Riski, now 100 years old, has journaled every single day since January 1, 1936.

As a child, Riski typically wrote about “the things that happened that day, or what the weather was like, or just simple things.” Even a quick browse through her diaries can tell you what the weather was like in North Dakota at just about any point over the last nine decades.

Living on a farm also gave Riski a lot to write about. One of her early diary entries from August of 1937 reads, “washed, churned, cleaned, church. Baked.”

“Every night she’d pull out that book and sit at the kitchen table and write,” says Michelle, Riski’s daughter.

“I don’t know how she did it all these years, because she worked at a meat processing plant that her and her husband ran and raised three kids. Had a husband with heart disease, took care of her mom and dad. I mean, just always go, go, go.”

Regardless of what the day brings, Riski devotes 15 minutes a day to her journaling, she says. Even when she was in the hospital after giving birth to her children, she’d write.

“I wrote on scrap paper then and transferred it to the diary when I got home,” Riski told the publication. “There was really no excuse for me not to write in it.”

When asked what she thinks contributes to a long and happy life, Riski says, “You need to work hard. Just strive to work harder all your life.”

She tells people who want to live to 100 to “keep doing your exercise, staying active, eating all the right foods, or try to.”