Among my mother’s legacies are four decades of yearly calendars. At the beginning of this year — a decade after her death — I resolved to read all 40. Could these appointment calendars, which she kept from 1965 through 2003, offer a window through which to glimpse my mother in the midst of living her life? Curious, I hoped that something as ordinary as her datebook might surprise me.

In the calendars, she is young again and on the go — this meeting or that, this child to the doctor and that one to the speech therapist, and all of them to the dentist.

An early entry in the first surviving calendar, Jan. 29, 1965, settles an ongoing sibling disagreement: “Carol sets [the table], Jane wash [the dishes], Nancy clears.” There we all are — her three daughters in the kitchen, our duties delineated. But it’s also the last year that all three of her daughters lived under her roof. As we headed off to college, the calendar kept track of our goings and comings.

Who owed her money from advances on their allowance? Well, that would be me (in debt for much of 1965 and 1966), and Nancy (complicated borrowing throughout the spring of 1965). Only my sister Jane — who went on to be deputy chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Bill Clinton — never borrowed money from my mother as a teenager.