The Blessings of Keeping a Journal

I have kept a journal for over thirty-two years and for the last three years in particular, I've journaled a minimum of five hours a week, with some weeks being closer to forty-five hours. Hence, you might say that I am a packrat of my journaling. {Never mind how I make sure to do everything I can to get everything saved in my journaling.}
My email is a vast source of extra journal keeping material and so is my blogging. Needless to say, I have the record of Kara's life over the past year. I just need to find it and get down here in this private blog journal and from there turn it into a blog I will share publicly [and that will then be turned into a book].
Since today is the first day of NaJoWriMo {National Journal Writing Month}, I decided I needed to make sure to capture everything on the page and the best way to do that was to start at the very beginning. I glanced in my journaling and did not have nearly enough material for the first couple of weeks after Kara found us. Therefore, I turned to my blogging and my emailing at the time. I started to read through the emails this morning and started to remember things I had forgotten. Thank the Lord I use my email and blogging as a form of journaling as well; otherwise, I would have some significant gaps in Kara's story. I was also reminded how finicky the memory can be. What a reminder it is how critical it is to journal. If I hadn't done some form of journal keeping, I would have lost some incredible memories of Kara.
It rather surprised me how easy and enjoyable it was to find the material on Kara. I imagined it would be rough and I might end up sobbing because of it, but that simply was not the case. It made me grin to remember moments with Kara.
The most important thing to know about Kara is that she had personality. She was a spitfire and a lovebug, with all the shades in between. It was what made her so delightful to get to know and love. She was feral and over the last year she made the shift from wild to lover. What a delight.
The blessings of keeping a journal never cease and Kara's tale is only proof of this.