That’s me, sitting under the window in my writing studio in our new house. I would like to say to Ms. Woolf before going further, “Dear Virginia, thank you for the good advice.” This is where I’ve been sitting down to write since Michael and I moved in December. We’ve spent our time since late July working here, making this 1910 house a good place for us. And now I am ready to stop scraping ceilings, sanding walls, priming and painting, filling nails holes, and considering trim so I can delve again into work less practical and yet persistently valuable to me.
Let me introduce you to the room. This is where the former lady of the house, Ella, did her sewing. She probably chose the shutters and window trim as well as the handles on the wonderful drawers and cupboards all around me. I’m the one who painted the room green and Michael pulled up the floor so the hundred year old fir could be refinished. You can see a spinning wheel made by Mr. E. Sorrels (an old man on the Key Peninsula) and my bobbins on a Lazy Kate my dad built, standing atop a rug stitched by my great-grandparents in North Dakota. I’m going to knit my first homespun garment this year, no excuses. I’ll put some things on the walls soon. On New Year’s Day I unpacked my box of journals and spent the time it takes to line them chronologically along the back of this desk. These are the things I would take if my house were on fire. Maybe I should keep an empty box nearby, but it's probably better not to live that way.
If you’ve written journals before you might know this strange thing; there is an increase of excitement toward the end, and then a queer adjustment of pacing lest your final sentence on the last page be about toast or the weather. It is gratifying to complete one. If you write in journals and enjoy organizing them chronologically on your desk or bookshelf you may also be familiar with the introductory, occasionally stiff and explanatory tone tinging the first few entries of a new volume, the tendency to write things like “Whirlie, my dog (5 ½ years old), just came in to put her head in my lap.” How much do these pages need to know about me? How much should be cleared-up and pointed-out should some distant generation of Flesher or Duggan get its hands on my pages? Following that thought, should I censor my private journal, or maybe even spice it up a little?
I have 29 journals in my collection, including the one I’m still writing in and I do find a censored self in them sometimes. There are also the rants (evident by large irregular handwriting and a disregard for polite sentence structure), and the entries that are only particulars without emotion, those catch-up paragraphs I write when for some reason I feel compelled to explain what has passed. I think they are usually honest, but that may be a discussion for another day, whether the person I strive to preserve there in those journals, or even here on this page, is truly the one I inhabit. (Now, that would be a satisfying last line, good self-indulgent philosophizing free from humdrum particulars of the content of one’s breakfast.)