In case it isn’t obvious from the cover of Driftless Spirits, a journal is central to the dream that launches Charlotte on her trip:

“Write what you know,” as Mark Twain is quoted. I love journals. There are a lot of ways to get into journaling. Some people keep a gratitude journal. Others use journals that provide a daily prompt to write about. I use journals in three different ways:

• 365 Journal for year-over-year comparisons and memories
• Bullet Journal for annual tracking of mundane life
• Writing Journals to log ideas and keep track of “facts” in my fictional world

Today’s post is about my 365 Journal. First, a 365 journal is a journal with every day on the calendar in it but no year.

I am logging nature observations and seasonal changes and such in mine. This started not long after we moved to the country in Wisconsin and I started experiencing an entirely different lifestyle than I had in the Chicago suburbs. For example, today I logged our first barn swallow sighting of spring:

I hope to get a picture of their aerial acrobatics under our covered porch one morning for a Driftless Thursday post. So far, I haven’t been fast enough.

As it happens, their timing was impeccable. They arrived on exactly the same day last year! I also knew this morning to hang our hummingbird feeder based on last year’s entry and put half an orange out for the Baltimore orioles as I’m now expecting to see them soon.

As I hope we can keep up with country living for another decade at least, by the time we leave this place my 365 Journal will be filled with memory prompts for wherever I find myself later in life. (By the way, my Driftless Thursday posts will serve the same purpose someday, but with pictures. I’ve added a tag cloud to the blog area of my homepage to help find entries.)

I’m curious if readers out there have unique ways of using journals. I’m always willing to add another book and ritual to my stack!