The Journal

She had no one to talk to about all that worried her as she tried to make a life for herself and her family in a new country. With rudimentary language skills she felt her limitations were magnified and wondered how long it would take until she got a true feel for the lay of the land. Her children began school and formal language instruction . She spent the time in between walking them to and from school, turning the small living space she had been given in a distant relatives home into a haven for her son and daughter and trying to learn as many new words as she could retain. Her husband would not arrive for six months so it all rested on her tiny shoulders. She felt the burden like the weight of a ton of bricks and as the weeks passed she seemed to be buckling beneath the load. One day on her way home, she paused to look into the window of a small neighbourhood bookstore and there she saw a small leatherbound journal, a quill pen and a jar of ink. It occured to her that her new life seemed to be unfolding in much the same way that a story does from its onset. The beginning is the promise of the end once the middle has been read, and so too was this, her new life in this new place. She recognized that this was her beginning and that she needed to be the author of her own lifes middle in order to arrive at the ending she had dreamed of before she arrived in her new country. The journal in its newness was the clean slate of her life and she wanted to fill its pages with all those words that would be the story of her life in her new home. She entered the store clutching her well worn bilingual phrasebook and managed to make her purchase.