Days of Green

 Photo by author

I started keeping a daytimer at work to keep track of meetings and appointments about 20 years ago. Gradually, I added family and school events and cute little things the children did or said. Finally I started making a note every day of something special that set the day apart. I started highlighting the different events in different colors to keep them straight. Appointments in yellow, for instance, and special events in green.

My favorite "green events" were spontaneous and happy moments. On special days the little block allowed for the day would overflow with green. My favored format is the Month-at-a-Glance Daytimer with a whole month of little squares on a double-page spread. I began to accumulate a pile of daytimers and it was fun to look back and see what I was doing exactly one year or two years ago. Sometimes I looked up the date we bought a new appliance or had the last dental checkup. Some days were sad and blank with a little black dot in the corner. Those were days that didn't need a notation to remember such as the day my mother died.

After my aunt died unexpectedly, I was able to look back in my books and remember all the fun things we had done together. Sometimes when I was waiting for a phone call or something, I would play a little game. I would choose the best green day of the month. Or the best green day of the year. Well, you get the idea.

A long running soap opera starts with the saying, "Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives." If we fail to note the little things that make our days unique, they run together in memory until much of our lives are lost.

I still keep my daytimer but I don't write in it every day any more. Now I have a blog. My blog is like a photo album, journal and pen pal club all rolled together. A couple of years ago I started creating a collage of photographs to show the highlights of the past year - sort of a visual Year-At-A-Glance. I publish it on my blog every New Year's day.

Maybe you think you don't have much to say but imagine how much a diary from an ancestor would mean to your family. Blogs can be downloaded to disks or printed out in a book to keep forever. Start recording the days of your live and you could create a family masterpiece some day.