Sometimes I ache to write. Thoughts spill over. Words create themselves and I simply…write.
I have piles of journals from over the years.
As a teenager, I wrote at the desk I shared with four sisters in our loft bedroom. I can still smell a summer thunderstorm sweeping over distant mountains and into our valley and my open window. I can feel the wind that rustles the pages of my journal and hear the sudden downpour drumming on the metal roof.
I wrote under fragrant climbing roses in my mama’s garden, morning dew seeping into my clothes, damp and chill. I wrote perched on a log in the woods or on a mossy bank beside mountain streams.
Tonight I am supposed to write my first blog post, to practice using the “Editor” and all the things—how to add an image, create a permalink, come up with categories and tags.
But when I am supposed to write it feels more like a chore and I am drawing a blank.
Is this how my kids feel when I put an assignment in front of them and say, “Write!?”
I learned to write by taking my journal up the towering hill behind my house. There was not a human in sight and the wind roared through the pines overhead and one day I spent perhaps an hour contemplating the sound of wind marching through the tops of trees and trying to express it in my journal.
I learned to write by writing letters. Real, handwritten letters posted in the mailbox. I wrote to my grandmother. She wrote back, telling me all about her life during WWII (which was my absolute favorite time in history).
One time I wrote a 12 page letter to a friend. I know because for some reason I never posted it and I still have it.
I laugh when I read it now. I laugh at my poetic attempts and my painstaking penmanship. (I was copying the Declaration of Independence in those days to practice handwriting. Homeschoolers…)
I read my old journals and letters and I wonder if one day these words, published to the world wide web for anyone to see, will make me laugh.
I wonder if I’ll read and smile fondly. Or if I will delete, delete in the same way I rip pages out of an old journal and toss them away.
I know I’ll always love to write. I think I was made to write.
So for myself and the pure joy of it, I write.
Welcome to my “journal.”
Thank you for reading my stories.
