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| stitching in car on highway 69 south bound |
My archives include photos and papers and actual quilts but this post's text is about my journals.
(the images in the post are of my recent stitching and grand daughter collaborative drawings)
My journals are 'my book' and I have been writing it for 37 years.
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| by 5 year old maia and grandmom |
A few years ago I started to type selected journals into the laptop.
In the beginning, I bundled up the books and put them back on the shelf.
See here.
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| by 5 year old maia and grandmom |
However, that wrapping only added to the 'journal clutter'
that I worry about leaving behind.
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| stitching in car on highway 69 north bound |
So now I am giving them to Ned to burn one by one.
I will never finish going through all of them,
but the project remains fascinating to me and I do it an hour each day.
Maybe some year I'll use the notes that are organized chronologically to help me
write a memoir or an autobiographical novel about being a mother artist.
As an intermittent journal keeper myself, I wonder sometimes about their fate. As someone who inherited my mother's journals, written in her teens and early twenties, I know that I am very glad she kept them, that I can visit her in her youth, now she is gone, and understand more about who she became. I also know that I am deeply saddened that, when my father died when I was 7, she burnt all his letters to her, thus depriving me of any access to him as a person, in the absence of memories. I would be wary of destruction, though I recognise that your situation and probably your journals' content is different, but the written work is dying, and my instinct is to preserve it.
ReplyDeletemaybe someday is my motto now.
ReplyDeletePlease do! Please write that book!
ReplyDelete