A Tale of Two Journals and Three Books

Living gratefully today, I appreciate the needed rain we received and the simple, and tasty, meal of take-and-bake pizza. I give thanks for morning quiet and for my mobility.

Earlier this month, my sisters and I published our third poetry compilation. It is titled My Sister Said . . . Poems about Sistering. Our first two books, April in Pieces: Seven Sisters Writing on COVID and Cancer and What Life Has Dished Up: Sisters and Their Musings were written in the unprecedented and intense times of the pandemic and the election cycle of 2020. Most of the poems in this third book were written in the last few months, as some of that intensity has leveled off.

The introduction to My Sister Said is unique, going back decades, a brief tale of two journals. The first is one kept by our mom in the mid-1990’s. She wrote with a theme of “I remember when . . . “ and would sometimes write as she waited for our dad to come home from helping with chores on our brother’s farm. I can picture her sitting in one of the rocking chairs in the kitchen. The two excerpts that are included in our book are two of her own experiences as a sister.

The second journal we simply dubbed “the sister journal” and it began a 14-year journey in late 1996. I started it and sent it to the eldest sister, Danita. My request to each sister was to share some of her own words, memories, and wisdom about family and sisterhood. Then each sister was asked to pass it along to the next in line, and it would end up coming back to me, the youngest sister. That journey took 14 years. Cancer wasn’t on our radar in 1996. By 2010, it sure was. Three of us had been diagnosed with breast cancer by then, and Mary Jo had also had a second diagnosis of cancer—primary lung cancer.

We were sisters who got along, kept in touch, and visited when we could. The uninvited and unexpected element of cancer in our lives brought our connection to different levels. As my sister Aileen called it, we “circled the wagons.”

The last time our journal got an addition, it was from Mary Jo. She enclosed a thank you note to the rest of us after we all gathered in Colorado in April 2018, following her diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer. It was the last time we were all in the same place at the same time. The journal sat on her nightstand in the months before her death. It was from that spot that I lovingly gathered it back a few days after she passed away.

We are seven sisters now, regularly together on weekly Zoom calls. We are poets, nature-lovers, bakers, walkers, and so much more.

Read on. And I invite you to write on. It has helped us preserve precious times in our lives and also process profound grace and grief.

Our books are all available on Amazon and this link will take you there.