I lost my journal yesterday. Now, in the spectrum of griefs, on a day when almost 100 people lost their lives in Norway, this is a very tiny blip. It’s just paper, w/ some words and drawings and pasted-in ephemera.

Perhaps because so many of the elders in my family had Alzheimer’s, losing memories is a big deal to me. That’s what losing my journal feels like — as if the past month has somehow slipped from my mind. Does the loss of the wedding invitation to my son’s wedding, pasted in to the front cover, mean I will forget this important day? Of course not.

Nor will I ‘lose’ the week I spent w/ my best friend and her lovely granddaughter. But I have lost the precise words that came to minnd when she told us about ‘anguished muffins’ (AKA English muffins), and the house that seemed to fly in the low clouds that shroud the Tillamook valley.

And I lost the drawing of the mountains, although not the memory of sitting on the deck. My family is sympathetic, but as non-writers, they don’t get why I’ve been wondering around in a funk on vacation. After all, the sun is out. It’s incredibly lovely here in Oregon — street musicians playing classical violin, children splashing in fountains. An almost impossibly blue sky.

So I compromise: I went to the art store down the street, bought Aquarelle water colour pencils and marbled turquoise paper to put in a new journal. I may be grieving, but I’m still hopeful about the general state of the universe :). And I still have a lot of memories to record…