ghosts in the basement

I was waist deep into rubbermaid chaos in the (soon to be spectacularly tidy) storage room tonight when I stumbles upon 2 boxes of my old things that I had tucked away in the corner.

There was my old Brownie uniform, baby shoes, plaques and awards.....and all of my old journals.

I can very clearly remember the first time I ever wrote in one of those hard backed books. I don't think they even sell them anymore but each one was the same; different coloured covers, small, full of just the right number of lined pages. I would tremble with excitement when starting a new one, starry-eyed thinking of what events and magics the pages would eventually contain (it always ended up being poorly spelled, over dramatised dribble...but I was a dreamer).

I remember the rustle of the fall leaves and the smell of the yard fire that my Dad was tending nearby. It was one of those crisp days, falling into early dark, where the air seems to fill your lungs with energy and imagination. I was thirteen years old and had just read Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery. Inspired by her story I decided to try my hand at keeping a journal. I fell in love with it that night. With wrestling thoughts and emotions into words and recording them. With trying to grasp that thing that always seems to be just out of reach, like a strand of music that is just to far away to be heard.

My Book of Thoughts, as I called each one, was the only ear that every heard many of my childhood and adolescent thoughts. In a home that was filled with explosive emotion and drama, where feeling were often used as weapons, it was my safe place to express all the things that I had to keep inside myself the rest of the time. Life's dramas and gossip I kept in the real world, my books were places for thoughts, faith and really, really bad poetry (really bad).

There are 13 books in that box, spanning 12 years of my life. I stopped keeping a journal shortly after Caley was born. Just one of the pieces of myself that was lost when I morphed into the creature called "Mom".

I tried to read some of them tonight, opening to random places and years. A moment waiting for my parents to come back from Russia, telling Eli I couldn't marry him, thanking God for finding Eli, hiking trips and mountains climbed, telling Brad I loved him, the deep loneliness of living in Edmonton, the day my Nana died, sneaking back into the room after everyone had left and kissing her goodbye....so many memories.

I am surprised by how raw I am feeling now. There is so much pain, hope, joy, despair and grief on those pages. I had to put the lid back on the box.





The second box contained the few things of my paternal grandmothers that I was able to salvage after the crawlspace in our last house flooded. A few letters of encouragement she had written me (why, oh why didn't I write her more often?), her favorite picture of me hanging from a tree, cards and crafts she lovingly saved despite their very hideousness. The crafts are wrapped in old linen from her house. I honestly don't remember what she ever used the little scraps of fabric for. Wonderful little scraps of white, they still, after all this time, moves and floods, they still smell like her. They smell like the most wonderful, eccentric, strong woman in the world. I breathed it in deep, and it smelled like love.