Journal – Photo: L. Weikel
Sense of Completion
It’s a full moon tonight/today. Technically, I’m writing this at midnight Friday night – and the moon will reach its fullness at 3:17 a.m. EST, just a scootch over three hours from now. But all day Saturday the moon will be considered full. And I just realized how the full moon is manifesting for me this month: in the sense of completion that comes with filling another journal cover to cover.
I began this journal at the beginning of August, a few days after discovering I’d left my prior journal buried in the cushions of our porch glider only to have it soaked by a torrential thunderstorm that saturated piles and piles of pillows and glider cushions to wreak havoc on my treasured notebook. The soaking and subsequent irreparable running of colored inks left many pages of that journal looking like simple watercolor washes. Utterly unreadable. It was awful, and I finally wrote about it here.
Momentous Memories
This current ‘diary’ that will be retired tomorrow spans just shy of seven months and contains some truly profound and treasured experiences. Its deep purple cover shields the pages that document our beloved Sheila’s decline and eventual passing in September.
On the other end of the spectrum, it spans the wedding of our youngest son – although, truth be told, I wrote more about the wedding here in my blog posts than I did in my actual journal. Sometimes, when you’re being pulled in several directions at once and trying to get a lot of last minute details covered, something has to give. Sadly, detailed entries for a spate of days in October were casualties of time devoted instead to hand-painting masks for the wedding party – a sacrifice I don’t regret. Although – as usual – I am disappointed that I didn’t slog through the sleepiness and capture more specific feelings and details.
But hey – at least I kept true to my 1111 Devotion and managed to get posts written and published throughout the entire festivities. Those posts were documentations too, just of a different sort.
The In-Between
And between those two high of highs and low of lows were the details of a pandemic spreading across our nation. Two pandemics, actually: one called Covid-19 that has topped 500,000 deaths in our country alone (in the span of a year) and another called political disinformation and lies by those elected as our representatives and leaders, leading to a literal armed insurrection.
Yep, this journal has seen a lot.
As usual, I’m grateful for the memories and eager to begin a new chapter in my life.
(T-273)
