Looking Back: Journaling at Seventeen

I admit it. When it comes to household chores, I can easily stray to something else more interesting in trying to carry out the task at hand. This happened just last week.

When cleaning out bookcases, who would not want to open the cover of a small black sketchbook with browned, deckle-edged pages and colored tissue paper peeking out from between the pages? The colored tissue paper poked my memory and I realized this little book was one of my early journals. The date of this particular volume – 1971.

It was the summer after my senior year of high school. I was young-seventeen, naive, and quite a romantic. When not working at my part-time job at a Seattle-based tug and barge company (an upcoming blog), I wrote poetry and short stories and read the poems of Rod McKuen. Does anyone else remember him?

This little book is filled with verse and pastel sketches. For me, sketching and writing combine to finish a thought, in case a detail is left out in one or the other. I see them as a way to tell the whole story.

So now, two months after completing a book on Kansas pioneers, I come across a poem that I wrote about pioneers when I was seventeen. I don’t remember why I wrote the poem, though I have always been interested in American history and fascinated by stories of westward expansion. Here is the poem, dear reader. Be kind in your critique- I was very young!

Feel the grass beneath your feet, pioneer.
Relax and feel the leaves fall.
Let the breeze brush across your face.
Let its music dance on your ears.

On through the trees and tall grass you have come.
Falling and hurt, people crying for sunshine,
some dying for visions of cabins and smiling blue skies.

Blink away the tears.
The sun will shine away your crying and pain,
paint you a sky,
and color your land with trees and grass
and a cabin to rest in.
With a fire’s dancing flames
to warm your feet as the day dies.
The moon blinking as it shines through the clouds,
the night playing its music to rock you to sleep.

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This shows another of the many reasons to keep a journal. One can get reacquainted with one’s younger self!

Thanks for reading.