Journal writing allows me to leave behind traces of my life in Daydreaming on the Porch

When we record our lives in journals, we become storycatchers. We believe that the ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them–for the one speaking and for the one listening; for the one writing and for the one reading…

For in writing we live life twice: once in the experience, and again in recording and reflecting upon our experience.
We understand that what we write has a great chance of outliving us…We join those who will leave hints and traces of their personal stories for the future to find.


Christina Baldwin

As I dug deep into my online journal archive, I came across an entry from April 2000 that I read with much nostalgia for the past, amusement, and also a degree of sadness that so many years have passed since the events portrayed. In fact, it’s one of those memories from days long gone that make you wonder what on earth transpired in the 22 years since then.

The journal entry was titled, “Parting is always hard,” and it recounted a memorable weekend visit to my aunt’s place in Sumter, SC, about a two-hour drive from Charleston. My sister and niece, 11, and nephew aged 8, were visiting my mother, brother and I from their home near Seattle. Mom was always overjoyed to see them, and when we were able to visit her sister, who we all dearly loved, it was a very special time, indeed.

My niece Kathryn is now 32, and married, and she and her husband have a 7-month old baby boy who is, we all agree, the most impossibly cute and smart and inquisitive child we have ever seen. This isn’t just our own bias, it’s true. Kathryn has a good job and works from home. Always cheerful and optimistic, she brightens ours days.

My nephew, John, is 29 and he and his girlfriend, Christine, have taken off from the world of work to travel in Mexico and South America, keeping a lively and entertaining travel blog featuring g accounts of their adventures and experiences, in what to me sound like exotic locales. I am so proud of them taking the time to explore the world when they are still young. My own travel adventures were all confined to the decade of the 1980s until the early 90’s, after which I finally was able to settle down in a long-sought-after, but hitherto elusive, career and city, Charleston, which turned out to be not only the perfect place for me, but also where my ancestors lived. There was never any world travel for me during that decade. I therefore, never cease to be amazed at the depth and scope of John and Christine’s travels in this new age of remote work and the Internet.

I am going to include here that journal entry from the dawn of the new Millenium, because in re-reading it years later, I found comfort and affirmation that I was able to help them have such a memorable visit, and that I can read the little anecdotes and narrative of events from that weekend. I never would have remembered some those funny, off-the-wall comments John made, precocious 8-year-old that he was. Or, the interactions of him and his sister with us adults, both observers and participants. It was so much fun.

That is why my continuous writing of journal entries, though not daily, but without any considerable disruption in time, has enabled me to live the experience twice, as Christina Baldwin notes, “once in the experience, and again in recording and reflecting upon [the] experience.“ Of course I have taken many photos of my niece and nephew over the years, and looking at those deeply stirs my memories of them. But to write down those experiences, as well as numerous others in a long-running journal, has given those memories a sense of permanence and personal detail that you can’t get in a photograph. And hopefully, though nothing is guaranteed, those volumes of my writing that I have had printed in spiral/bound books, will have some degree of permanence and lasting value, my legacy, in a way, since I have no children. That perhaps is perhaps greatest gift to come of all this faithful writing for so many years.

Many other readers besides family members have read and commented on entries over the decades I have been writing them. Unlike a diary, which is a more literal accounting of one’s life on a daily basis, a journal such as I write can more accurately be said to contain numerous essays, three a week, once a week, or monthly when I was writing almost exclusively the Dementia Journal I wrote in great detail when I was my mother’s caregiver.

When I started writing more frequently, starting in early 2020 after my mother died, I resumed writing memory pieces about my childhood, adolescence and adulthood as I entered the world of jobs and careers. I’ve also explored numerous topics of interest to me, much as I did when writing weekly newspaper columns during my career in journalism. It’s been a long writing adventure, the story of my life and interests, and intellectual preoccupations, from paper to online with the advent of the Internet.

What follows is peek into of my life’s time capsule, a written record here of the joys of family travel and get-togethers. In some ways I wish more of my journal entries elicited the good memories and pure enjoyment of life as depicted here, but that is just one aspect of life. My 22 years of online writing contain the good and the bad memories, happiness and despair, enlightenment and hope. But most of all, I’m grateful that I have been able to write all this, for myself and others.

Parting is always hard
((Written April 13, 2000)

We’re bracing ourselves for tomorrow afternoon when we’ll load up the car for the trip to the airport, and my niece, nephew and sister will be on their way home to Washington State. It’s been a wonderful visit, full of good times and memories that will last long after they’re gone.

Wednesday, we made the 2-hour drive to Sumter to see Aunt Rose, and as soon as the children walked in the door, they had another goodie bag full of cookies and chips and some more candy, which they immediately proceeded to open and start eating. I told my nephew, John, that if he had another one of those Almond Joy bars he wouldn’t feel like any lunch at Quincy’s buffet shortly. You think that made one slight bit of an impression? “But I’m on vacation,” he said triumphantly. I was helpless in the face of such logic.

Later, at the buffet, he made the merest token of an effort at eating anything substantial. His plate contained, let’s see if I remember, a couple of spoonfuls of plain rice, a dollup of macaroni, and a piece of chicken. He and my niece were really saving up for the dessert bar where you can get unlimited soft ice cream in sugar cones.

John and Kathryn got the chocolate and vanilla swirl combination. My aunt wanted a small cone of the same thing, so I went to the dessert bar and proceeded to pull the lever for vanilla. After a wobbly amount had filled the cone, I did the same with the chocolate portion, making sort of a mess. When I returned to the table, this provoked gales of laughter from my 8-year-old nephew, and 11-year-old niece, who asked me why I hadn’t just pulled the swirled ice cream lever and gotten an automatic mixture of chocolate and vanilla. It hadn’t occurred to me they would make it that easy. Adults can do such dumb things. Anyway….

It had been a perfectly beautiful Spring day, great for traveling. The countryside was resplendent in its seasonal finery, and sunlight illuminated the fresh green of the woods and fields all along our route. Great wide beams of light broke through in places where the clouds parted. It was almost summerlike. Warm, but not hot. Everything you’d want in a Spring day.

A side trip took us to Santee National Wildlife Refuge where we drove along a tree-covered road next to Lake Marion, and then stopped so the children could climb the steps to the top of a 40-foot Indian mound that was once used as a fort during the Revolutionary War. Naturally, the ever-inquisitive John wanted to go beyond the closed-in observation tower and explore the rest of the mound, but I prevailed upon him, for safety reasons, not to. But I know I would have done the same thing at his age.

Yesterday, back in Charleston, it was cloudy, windy and cool — the very opposite of the previous weekend’s perfect weather — but we didn’t let that stop us from going to the Caw Caw Nature Interpretive Center about a half hour’s drive from Charleston. This is the new county park that has been open only a couple of months, and I wanted the children to see it. I’ve been twice and wrote about it here.

As we were driving there, I had the usual “Oldies” station on the radio, and it was playing the same old mishmash of recycled tunes (some of which I still never tire of hearing after all these years). I had been flipping around stations earlier and had landed on a song by one of those new groups you’ve never heard of (“Smashing Pumpkins,” I think it was called), and I had to turn that up a bit so Kathryn could hear it. Very soon thereafter, an old Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs song was playing on the Oldies station, “Wooly Bully,” and admittedly, it’s a pretty awful song, but it was one of those 60’s Top 40s favorites you remember from your school days. As soon as I proceeded, jokingly, to turn up the volume on that song so the children could better appreciate one of the classics from my day, John said in a loud voice, “It doesn’t get any worse than that!” So much for inter-generational communication through music.

At the park, we took the long rice field/waterfowl loop trail that started at the visitor center and led first to a small section of boardwalk over marsh. The woods we passed through were a good example of this type of Lowcountry forested landscape, and I was able to point out the different types of trees such as water oak, swamp chestnut oak, hop hornbeam (related to the beech), magnolia, and various species of pines, etc. Every time I would get ahead of them on the trail, they’d linger behind because, as I should have known, inquisitive children like to take their time and savor Nature, up close. John noticed, and had to comment on, every single caterpillar species he saw on the wooden railing along the boardwalk. Of course, it then dawned on me that it was that time of year when those fuzzy and annoying creatures are eating the tender, new-green leaves that I love to look at. I don’t like them very much, but to a small boy, they are endlessly fascinating.

We had our binoculars and saw ducks and hawks and egrets and other marsh birds. The wind felt good in our faces and the afternoon stretched out like a pleasant dream. How nice it was to see that place through the fresh and uninhibited eyes of children. The next time I’m there hiking by myself, I’m going to slow down a bit and look at things more closely. For sure.

It was a day to remember. Traces of my life.

Last updated August 18, 2022