The Morning Scribbler blog is within the Bizarre Horizons website, a place for me to have the freedom to post the ordinary and the extraordinary aspects of my daily life. Journals have always been a part of my daily life. My shelves are filled with journals, both lined and unlined, filled with drawings and filled with text. My love for creating my own journals for both writing and drawing have led to entries being scattered about in a total disregard for linear time. I lose track of which journal I’m working in and I jump to another one that I can’t resist feeling in my hands and testing my pens upon the paper.

On February 13th of this year, 2020, I began my Morning Scribbler Journal, committed to work in the same journal from the first page until the last, rather than create my scribbles on scraps of paper that are then tossed into a box and stashed away somewhere in my studio, becoming nothing more than clutter and lost memories. Each morning when I added the note on each scribble documenting the time I spent on the sketch, I smiled, remembering the entries my sisters and I discovered in both my grandmother’s diary and my mother’s diary.

Each day, my grandmother made a short entry, usually only two sentences, noting a task of the day on the farm in Indiana, or a communication with a family member. Sometimes, it was a brief note on a local event. Skipping all the way down to the bottom of the page, past all the lines left blank where she might have written her feelings, emotions or personal thoughts , she documented the number of eggs she collected that day.

Each day, my mother made a short entry into her diary. She often wrote twice as much as my grandmother, four or five sentences, sometimes filling three-quarters of the page. She, too, omitted any mention of her personal feelings about the life that was spinning around her. Skipping down to the bottom of the page, she documented the items she had ironed that day. Even on our cross-country road trips, she ironed.

A few days ago, I needed a small, lined book to dedicate to notes and outlines of online classes I’m teaching. I pulled a what I thought to be an unused journal from the shelf. I discovered i had used about half the pages spanning the time between November 8, 1993 and July 24, 1994. I will share a few of the entries. I am definitely my mother’s daughter.

November 21, 1993