The notebook lives between the fruit bowl and the radio, a plain black-and-white composition book with a pen clipped to the cover. This morning's entry reads, in full: "Feb 21. 38 degrees at 7, sunny by 10. Daffodils up by the mailbox. Toilet still fixed. Pepper ate a sock (survived)." That's it. Most days it's about that long. I have been keeping it for a little over a year, and I would now rescue it from a fire before most of what we own.
What a home journal is (for us)
It isn't a diary, and it isn't a planner. I keep my feelings and my to-do lists elsewhere. The home journal is a running record of the house and the yard and the small facts of our days. The weather. What bloomed. What broke, what we fixed and what it cost. When the heat pump made a new noise. When the pecans started dropping.
I spent years at the library helping people track down when something happened, and I know how slippery memory is. "Didn't we replace that filter in the fall?" is a question that can eat a whole evening. The journal answers it in thirty seconds.
How I keep it
The rules are deliberately loose, because any system I make too fancy gets abandoned by March.
- One line minimum, no maximum. Date and weather always. Anything else is a bonus.
- Write numbers down. Prices, temperatures, meter readings, the bill total. Numbers are what I'm most grateful for later.
- Keep it in the kitchen. Not a desk drawer, not my nightstand. It goes where the life of the house happens.
- Anyone can write in it. Ben adds rainfall totals from his gauge. Lila, who is six, draws pictures of the dog. Both are welcome.
- Don't go back and tidy. Crossed-out lines and coffee rings stay.
I use a $2 composition book from the drugstore. It is sturdy, it lies flat enough, and there is nothing precious about it, so I'm never afraid to scribble.
A few symbols that help
Over time I've settled on a handful of marks in the margin so I can flip back and find things quickly:
- A small $ next to anything with a cost.
- A wrench (badly drawn) for repairs and maintenance.
- A leaf for anything in the yard or garden.
- A star for a day I want to remember for no practical reason at all.
What it has taught us so far
Paging back through last year this week, a few things jumped out.
In May there's an entry about the free home energy audit our utility offered, with my scrawl underneath: "leaky ducts in attic, insulation thin." In July: "ducts sealed, $380." In August, underlined twice: "electric bill $312." And in November: "attic insulation topped up, $1,450, crew of two, done by 3." Reading those in a row, I can see the whole story of a year spent slowly fixing a house, which is easy to lose when you're living through it a bill at a time.
The journal also caught the water problem. Over a few weeks in January I'd written "toilet running again" four separate times. Seeing it written down four times made it real in a way hearing it hiss at night never did. This month I finally replaced the flapper, a $6 part and fifteen minutes of my afternoon, and the hissing stopped. The kitchen faucet drip is next on the list. I've already written that down too, which is how I know it will get done.
The yard, year over year
This is the part I didn't expect to love. Last year the daffodils by the mailbox opened on February 26. This year, the 19th. The first pine pollen on the car was March 14. The pecans started dropping in earnest in late October. Now I have one year to compare against, and next year I'll have two. It's a very small kind of almanac, and it is ours.
If you'd like to start one
Pick up whatever notebook is already in the house. Put it somewhere you pass every day. Write today's date and what the sky is doing. That's the whole first entry. Tomorrow, maybe add what you paid for groceries or when the dog was last at the vet. Don't decide what it's for yet. Let it tell you.
Lila just came in from the yard with a fistful of violets and asked if she could write in the book. She wrote "Vilets. Purpel." and drew Pepper with a sock in her mouth. I think that's the best entry of the week.
