taking time for treasures

In about four hours, I have to get up to get ready to drive to a funeral that’s about 5 hours away. so technically, I don’t have time to be writing this, because I need to be sleeping. But part of my brain is telling me that I won’t be able to sleep anyway, unless I get these thoughts out of my head, so here I am, writing.

Today, in a box stuffed into a shelf in the attic, Ed found something that I have been missing for almost six years, ever since we moved to Chemnitz: my old journals. Not a big deal to some; a priceless treasure to me. When he brought that box down from the attic and I realized what was in it, I whooped for joy. Literally whooped. Not many people in my life have had the experience of being in my presence when I whooped, but Silke and Guido had that experience today, because they were here when it happened. I whooped.

Anyway…my old journals. I have them back. And I’m very happy about that. These are my journals spanning most of my teens and my early 20s. These are pre-blogging journals. These are pre-*typing* journals. The only drawback to finding them is that I now see how terrible my handwriting used to be. (Some might claim it’s still terrible, but for now, that’s neither here nor there nor anywhere.)

The earliest one starts out like this: “Hello. My name is Courtney Anne Weger. I am 14 years old…” And so begins the saga. Cute, eh? What’s funny to me, as I page through these written treasures, is to see that that 14-year-old had quite a few mature insights and quite a bit more wisdom than the 17-year-old or 19-year-old who was to reveal herself in later writings. Something happened to me between the ages of 14 and 17. I think it was hormones, because most of my journal entries from my later teen years seem to concern boys. Good grief…did I not think about anything else?

I would be mortified if anyone read some of the things I wrote back then. But I’m also finding lots of happy memories, moments that I described in detail because they meant so much to me. I read them, and I find myself thinking, “Hey, I *remember* that…” even though I hadn’t thought of it in years. I remember now what happened, and I remember who I was, and I find that I don’t dislike that girl of years ago as much as I thought I disliked her.

Someone once said that a woman’s heart is a deep ocean full of secrets. Sometimes, a girl’s heart is deep that way, too. Another someone once said that we can’t know who we are and where we’re going until we know who we were and where we came from. My journals help me know these things. I’m thankful to have them again.