Another Working Journal

I'm still stuck on the question I posed the other day:  when does your journal make you happy?  Monday afternoon my eleven-year-old grandson and I went hiking on a small mountain in my neighborhood that we've hiked many times.  We're always in search of a grave marker that was planted in the woods on the south face of the mountain to commemorate the first European settler in this area, who died on the mountain in the 1700s.  The marker has been swallowed up by development on that face of the mountain, so it's very hard to see it these days.  The one time Jacob and I located it in its newly imprisoned environment, the land-owner chased us away, and we only got a glimpse as we went back down the newly private road. 

So I had gotten the idea that if we climbed over the top of the north face and came stealthily down the south face we might be able to see the elusive marker as we approached from above.  We had heard of hikers who had done that (the irate property owner complained about them to us as she chased us away).  So we set out to find the trail, bringing along our adventure journal, which we've kept for several years to record things we do together.  This time we made a map in the notebook as we walked off the familiar trail to help us find our way home.  You can see that we found some beautiful clay, which we rubbed on the page while collecting some of it to make into paint. 

This little unbeautiful notebook is a great treasure to both Jacob and me because we look back into it to remember adventures we've had and to find out information we would have otherwise forgotten (how DID we attach the penny to the railroad track that time?)