What fun, Deborah—I adore going down to my writing cabin when I’ve finished a journal and getting to pick a new one to start in from a lifetime’s backlog of Christmas gifts…a feast of textures: should I go for the green velvet cover? The yellow and purples pansies wrinkling up out of soft, dried, handmade pulp? The water lillies of Monet?

The first photo features the journal I just finished using this week—a real beauty, put together at Snapfish by my cousin Sarah. Knowing my love for poetry, she intuitively (without realizing it was a favorite of mine) reprinted a few stanzas from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot on the inside cover. As I flipped through on my “drive by” for snippets to shape into other work, I passed a note I’d taped in there from my daughter, “Mom, will you take a walk with just me tonight.”

The second photo captures the transition…from the last journal, with its cover photo taken by Sarah at the Castro Theater in SF…to the next journal, featuring the simple quote: “Celebrate Change” and the extended hand. I usually don’t go for lined journals, but this one alternates between lined pages and blank pages with faint images in the background (tea leaves, bamboo, teapots) and was given to be my a friend I love dearly, who constantly reminds me to love the life before me as it is with all its messy particulars.
And, she also advised: to try to balance out the scrutiny of a day’s misadventures with a few words of gratitude about specific things I love about my children and husband. Which I did last night, chronicling the exhaustion of a week under duress of a chest cold on my lined page, then skirting the borders of a faint crane flying into the sun on my “blank page,” nailing down the images of the day: my brother installing a punching bag for my sons under the deck, the way the deck shakes with each strike, how cheerful and instinctive my 4 your old approached the bag for the first time, with the words, “Take that! And that!”