"Our desire to find or create the perfect home can be sentimental or practical; aesthetic, or deeply emotional.  The compulsion is often fierce, obsessive, even reckless.  The longing emerges out of a private mythology, formed from dreams dreamt long ago in childhood, from images found in children's books, and in reveries of the past.  "Home" takes imaginary form as a place where people are kind, where children flourish, where profound ceremonies are celebrated.  At home there is warmth, light, and comfort.  There is food in abundance; full tables give shape to our idea of holidays.  To these quiet, essential human imaginings, the paintings of Canadian artists offer their own special tribute."

~ Joan Murray, Oshawa, Ontario.  CELEBRATING HOME ~ A Collection of Canada's Best-Loved Painters, Prospero Books, 2008.

Journals can be as sophisticated or as simple as the writer chooses.  In Sophia MacNab's journal she wrote, "I have now finished writing this book through and it has taken me nearly seven months.  I am twenty one.  My dear Momma told me to keep one always and if I keep it until I am twenty one I will have written thirteen volumes.  I only hope that I may have the perseverance to continue it," Sophia wrote on July 8th., 1846.

Some of us may feel like Sophia did on one particular day:

"I think is would do almost as well to write one day and copy all the next from it, there is so little variety....it is useless to give such a long detail of each day, so I am merely going to put that we went through the usual 'routine'."

THE DIARY of SOPHIE MACNAB, written at Dundurn Castle, Hamilton, 1846 age 13.  W.L. Griffi Printing, 1968.

Study in Gardens

"I run back into the woods with their serene perplexities, their fathomless deeps and singing fresh green tips.  These days when the sun is bright they just chuckle with glory and joy."

"There are themes everywhere, something sublime, something ridiculous, or joyous, or calm, or mysterious.  Tender youthfulness laughing at gnarled oldness.  Moss and ferns, and leaves and twigs, but only apparently tied up in stillness and silence.  You must be still in order to hear and see."

~ Emily Carr, HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS.

[Please click on photo for larger image.]

"Oh to be still enough to hear and see and know the glory of the sky and earth and sea!" ~ Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands

~ Emily Carr, EMILY CARR COUNTRY, Portrayed by Courtney Milne, 2001.McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

Happy Valentine's Day ~
                 ~ Emily Dickinson

The rose did caper on her cheek,
     Her bodice rose and fell,
Her pretty speech, like drunken men,
Did stagger pitiful.

Her fingers fumbled at her work, ~
Her needle would not go ;
What ailed so smart a little maid
It puzzled me to know,

Till opposite I spied a cheek
That bore another rose ;
Just opposite, another speech
That like the drunkard goes ;

A vest that, like the bodice, danced
To the immortal tune, ~
Till those two trouble little clocks
Ticked softly into one.