Looking over some of the blogs I read and commented on, there was discussion about keeping and writing a journal, how easy it is to start and stop them, but how hard to keep with the discipline, how this gets harder as we get older. In keeping with that, I took a couple of entries from one of many summers I spent as a kid in Pennsylvania and typed them up as a kind of memory trip. I changed a few verbs and things, spelling a bit.
How is it this was so easy to do and now takes so much effort?
I like it in the morning, out, all alone, in the dark, we can hear each other breathing the cows and that it's good here, because, well you can see.
These are no days when I'm safe and the only fair way to split the food for dinner is separating all of us into different rooms and calling us one by one to get our plate. If Mom didn't start doing that way, I'd get as much as I could fight for. No more. That wasn't much. I always waited to be last, carrying buckets and rope, getting all the tools ready for the morning when everybody else screamed or waited to get called. Had to get the cow taken care of. I'd like the barn and watering pond when they all go in. It's quiet like a farm, standing still, watch my salvation.
In the morning we all have things to do. Some of the old ones, like Chick and Lucelle call them chores. We're all old enough now so we spend two months a piece taking care in the morning. We have to check the hens, get eggs, water the goats, horses, milk cows, carry in bacon and sausages from the freezer, set the feed and make sure it's ready for the hands when they get here at nine.
Since we do the early shift now Mom, she prays no one falls off the thresher or gets caught up in Rudy's horns. Let my brothers and sisters fight it all, I know even after they leave the kitchen, Mom will give me my dinner so I don't have to duke it out.
Before now I go to bed. Dinner was mince and potatoes and chocolate My-T-Fine pudding. And cupcakes. Always like that. Because I fixed the harness early, I get a coke with my food.
It's the best part.
Comments (1)
I suspect that it's harder now because we're more self-conscious, worrying about who will read it, and what do we really want to put into it, etc. And also, as a writer, you'd be concerned with questions of style and readability. I mean, if you were writing it now, would you really want to put in what you had for supper?
You'd probably put in something about your chores, and family relationships, and then start worrying whether you should have included less or explained more.
And I suspect another reason is that you'd begrudge yourself the time for it. It isn't as if once you've done your family chores and homework you're all done for the day, except for a bit of diary-writing. If you're anything of a serious writer you have fifty ideas bubbling in your head, wanting you to attend to them, and kill the blasted diary!
Posted by Lucy | November 20, 2007 9:37 AM
Posted on November 20, 2007 09:37