I couldn’t believe my eyes when I woke up. There it was, the sun, shining through the bedroom window. The sky was even blue. I ran downstairs trailed by Gracie and Fern and opened the front door. The sun streamed through the glass and Fern got comfy on the rug in the heat of the sunlight. Gracie went into the yard, and I went onto the deck. There was a bit of a morning chill, but I didn’t care. We have sun, glorious sun.

One side of my den table is covered in sticky notes. A list of perennials for the garden fill one note. I chose flowers of varying heights because I particularly want some taller ones for the back. Another sticky has a small shopping list for today: bird seed, cat food and toilet paper. A third note is a reminder I need to go to CVS.  The last note has a list of authors I want to read and a few apps I want to download to my iPad. Sticky notes are my salvation.

When I was around twelve or thirteen, I got a diary as a Christmas present. The cover was pink vinyl and had a cartoonish teenage girl on the front talking on the phone. The diary came with a small gold key, but I really didn’t need to lock it. Little in there was ever something I wanted hidden. In my first few entries I mostly talked about school and drill (I was on a drill team) and what my friends and I were doing which wasn’t much. I did mention sneaking out of school at lunch time pretending I was going home to eat. I also admitted to my diary that I had lied. I arrived back to school late after lunch some days and told the nun I was with Father somebody or other. She always bought the lie.

I didn’t have enough teenage angst to fill my diary. I wrote about being angry with my mother or father, but that anger never lasted long. I wrote about what a jerk my brother was, but that was no revelation. Life for me was really pretty easy. I got tired of that diary after only a few months and stopped writing in it. I put it in my drawer and just left it there. It got covered with stuff, and I forgot all about it until we were moving to the Cape. I was clearing out my bureau where I found the diary and started reading. It was about the most boring thing I’d ever read.