journal | You Are Here

“Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing.” —Anne Frank, June 20, 1942

“She found that when she didn’t have a notebook it was hard for her to think. The thoughts came slowly, as though they had to squeeze through a tiny door to get to her, whereas when she wrote, they flowed out faster than she could put them down.” ―Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

***

I am 14 years old, sitting cross-legged on my yellow bedspread behind the locked door of my bedroom. A college-ruled three-subject notebook is open in my lap, and I scribble away, thoughts coming to me faster than I can get them down on paper.

Excitement about the cute boy on the bus who actually said hello to me today. Anxiety about the oral report I’m expected to give in social studies class tomorrow morning. Heartache about being ignored in the cafeteria by a girl I used to consider my best friend.

***

I am 20 years old, a junior in college, tucked into a wood-scarred booth in the campus grill. Snow is piling up outside, and I am settled into my favorite study spot with a hot mug of tea and piles of manila envelopes full of submissions to the literary magazine, of which I am co-editor. I arrange a stack of blank index cards upon which I will record my impressions of the poems and stories.

But first, I open the hardcover black and white lab book that has served as my journal since last term’s poetry-writing class. Now that I am no longer expected to periodically turn it in for review, I feel a new-found freedom to write without editing myself, comforted that no one will read my private thoughts but me.

I write about my confusing romantic feelings for a male friend who happens to be dating someone else. I vent about my concerns for my father, who is weathering the downturn of the steel industry and seems to be aging at presidential speed between my visits home. I jot down prayers and snippets of Scripture to comfort and encourage myself.

***

I am 29 years old, working in a job that I love, in a city that I love, involved in a quirky inner-city church that I love. I am sharing a quaint townhouse with two other single women who have become good friends. And I am falling in love with a man I met seven years ago, but started dating only after we lived a couple hundred miles away from one another.

Every evening before I go to sleep, I pour my heart out on paper, into fabric-covered journals given to me as gifts and filled at a record pace. It isn’t decision time yet, but what if this is the man I am supposed to marry? What will this mean for the life I am building in this place, with these people?

Over the next several months, in the pages of several more journals, those questions are answered. I am even more deeply committed my job, my city, my friends, and my church. I write with excitement about buying a house and living alone for the first time in my life.

***

The day after I turn 40, my mother, diagnosed seven months earlier with pancreatic cancer, goes into hospice care. I open a Word document on my laptop and type my grief and fear and rage onto the screen. Tears stream down my face as I hit save and shut down.

***

I celebrated my 50th birthday last month. For a decade or more, my journal entries have become more and more sporadic, as I check in to write at least twice a year—on my birthday and on New Year’s Day. Email and blog posts and social media have replaced my hand-written diary as venues for self-expression. Almost everything I write has an audience.

As I wrote my annual birthday journal entry in the leather-bound diary that I only occasionally crack open these days, I made a resolution. I haven’t missed a day of writing in my journal since.

***

A small antique dining table, repurposed as my writing table, sits by a large window in the breakfast room. The cherry wood has a smooth rich patina ripened by age and signed by watermarks from a continual parade of tea cups, coffee mugs, flower pots, and leaky bud vases.

Out the window, the arborvitae along the fence line sway in the breeze like a happy gospel choir. Sunlight from the east plays with leaves hanging on high branches; light darts in and out between the green like a hummingbird searching for nectar.

The sudden appearance of a chipmunk perched on the head of my garden statue—the sculpture of a little boy sitting cross-legged with a rabbit in his lap—startles me. I gasp. The chipmunk’s bushy tale drapes down the side of the little boy’s head like a furry hat. The animal blends into the concrete. A still life.

Cardinals, sparrows, and house finches engage in a noisy flurry at the birdfeeder. With an abrupt turn of his head, the chipmunk pauses, perks up like a meerkat, and scampers into the low-lying shrubbery.

A male cardinal, proud and red, with a wisp of red plumage atop his head, wins the battle for position at the feeder. His female counterpart is thin, grayish, and pale. He—I named him D’Artagnan after the most valiant of Dumas’ characters in The Three Musketeers—pecks at the safflower seed in the hanging wire silo, captures a seed in his mouth, cracks it with his sturdy beak and passes it to his lady, like a lover giving a gentle kiss to his beloved.

With a swoosh, Mae West, a round-breasted mourning dove, alights on top of the feeder, causing it to sway as she sashays about with her full bustle. Because of their size, the doves hold the keys to the coffer of seeds. They make merry and dine and grow bloated with time. There are no leftovers. Not one crackle.

*****

In early 2013, I was diagnosed with cancer. My world went still, folding in on itself like useless bellows.

The chemotherapy I received was a benevolent poison; while killing the unhealthy cells, it attacked healthy cells, also, resulting in extreme fatigue, an inability to concentrate, and a weakened immune system.

Words became hazy on the page of a book; it was hard to read a whole paragraph and understand it. The computer screen’s light altered my vision; tears salted my cheeks. It was as if someone had stuck me in a tightly bound book, slammed it shut, and shelved it.

My husband installed birdfeeders in our backyard outside the breakfast room window. He stocked them with thistle seed and safflower.

I watched and waited.

Every morning, I crept toward the kitchen, grimacing when the old wood floors creaked, hoping not to scare away my first visitor. A study in red—D’Artagnan—was perched at the feeder one morning as I tiptoed around the corner from the den.

On subsequent mornings, brilliant goldfinches, chickadees, tufted titmice, and doves arrived. The rare appearance of indigo buntings and a rose-breasted grosbeak—his chest splashed with red like blood from a dagger wound—pulled me from my chair. Adam must have felt the weight of words when God said: Name them.

I sat down. With a shaky hand, I scrawled fragments of sentences in my journal.

*****

A small young dove slow-steps along the brick window sill. As I rest my elbows on the table, its old joints creak. The bird stops, turns his slick gumball head, considers me with his black bead of an eye, and with his slender beak commences a gentle tapping on the glass. Tap. Tap. Tap.

He is not looking at me, but at his own reflection wrought by the play of light on the glass making a mirror image of himself. His kinfolk arrive and with a whistling of his wings, he shoots away to the trees.

My blank computer screen stares at me. My journal is open beside me on the table. I begin to type: In early 2013, I was diagnosed with cancer….

Images by Lisa Taylor Phillips

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True stories about roots, identity, and place.

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Dear Diary

A Still Life