First Journal Entry

This is a polaroid photograph of the family cat when my sister and I were little.  Her name was Dusty.  She was a magnificent calico who introduced herself to my family by crawling into my father's lap as he worked on one of our boats in a friend's yard.  That was several years before I was born and she was a member of the family until she died when I was 14.  We used to be able to judge how severe approaching storms would be by how far down the basement stairs she would sit.  We'd have "one step alerts," "two step alerts," and so forth.  If she was on the basement floor, we could expect a hurricane and the power to go out for a while.  When it was cold, she'd curl up under the sheets on the beds so all we could see was a lump in the middle.  My sister and I used to dress her up in doll clothes and put her in Jennifer's pink baby carriage.  We also used to build mazes out of a set of cardboard bricks, throw an afghan over the top, shove Dusty in the maze, and try to get her to run through it.  She never did, though, she just knocked down the cardboard brick wall :)

I was clearing out my desk last weekend and came across this piece of yellow legal paper.  It appears to be my first attempt at keeping a journal and Dusty is the main topic.  I scanned it in, bumped up the contrast, and enlarged it to be more or less legible.

This is what the whole sheet of paper looked like, complete with illustration.