Grandma’s Journals

My life breath is found in words- first God’s Word, then my thoughts and interaction with the application of it. There is a need, a desire, and an urgency I feel about words; the drive to write, reflect, and apply is wired into the core of my being. So many thoughts are constantly swirling inside myself- rarely do I have the quiet space necessary to process, to craft, to order the words into a tapestry that speaks to others. And so I “free-write” in my journals, meaning that the only thing I do is allow thoughts to fall out of my brain and onto the page, unedited and unorganized.

Yet as I reflect on the memory of my Grandma “making me” keep a journal on our trips to Michigan, I am reminded of writing can manifest itself completely differently in the same exercise. Grandma’s travel journals served as benchmarks of progress- departure times, clean rest stops, good places to grab lunch. Her journals, filled with decades of marking time: date, time & activity, are exactly the opposite of mine. My travel journals are reflective, an exploration of the interplay between where I’ve been and who I’m becoming. Travel seems to create a sense of suspended animation, the state of being caught in the journey between preparation and arrival.

The odd realization that my Grandma’s journals would reveal no insight into her emotional journey doesn’t lessen my wish to have them today. Somehow being able to see time marked by her own hand, to read minutes of the only travel they ever made outside their daily life, to see minutes recorded as though the very act of writing them would make them linger, would be strangely comforting to me.

The thing about Grandma’s journals is that she kept them year after year, and was even known to bring along old ones for reference. And yet, here in this collage of memories is the undeniable truth that she always went to the same place at the same time, taking the same route, year after year. If you only travel a road you know well, it takes more effort to observe new things. If you travel the same road but once a year, it takes great effort to only observe things unchanged.

I feel that my life is an unrevealed path that only God understands. Dates, places and experiences are noted in my journals to provide context, but remain the only static element in my writing. Unlike Grandma’s need to faithfully record every major mile marker along the way and the time we passed it, my writing is the journey itself.

I now see that there is also value in Grandma’s seemingly passionless recording of time, date, and place. Her journals were literally to the minute: “7:02am-pulling out.” Yep, she really said that. The funniest thing to me, as I am a self-proclaimed “journal snob” who judges value by binding, line and size, is that Grandma only used little two-by-three inch spiral notebooks- the kind you find practically free in any store, and so small that there wasn’t even room for her to write “pulling out of the driveway.” She only used a single line for each entry.

The first time I travelled to Michigan with them, Grandma proudly presented me with my own journal and proceeded to teach me how to use it. I spent the entire week erasing writing that was too big, and trying different strategies for making my volume of thoughts fit on a single small line. After growing frustrated from trying to fit the ocean in a paper cup, I forged my own method. I see now that trying to demonstrate or explain my free-writing journal technique would likely have been equally futile and puzzling to my Grandma.

Grandma’s writing became quick and efficient records of where the family was on their annual trek to Michigan. And yet is that so different from my own journal? I may write 500 words at a time and fill page after page before I finish, but am I not still trying to capture, compare, and record where I am in time and how that compares to where I expected to be?

Remembering Grandma’s journals somehow comforts me to realize a larger truth, that even as my daily life is completely different on the surface, I am still a woman seeking to keep a record of my journey. The difference lies in our voice, and our perspective. Grandma viewed their annual drive from Indiana to Michigan as the only journey worth noting. My literal travel gives me the space to reconsider and contemplate the daily journey through life that I record on a regular basis.