Journaling at the end of the day or week helps to translate events into words. The act of writing experiences down by hand engraves them further in our memory and has the added benefit of processing out emotions. Before we had children, I kept quite detailed diaries, collecting cinema stubs, receipts, or other paper mementos. As a young mother, these entries became shorter and less frequent, but one practice that I found especially useful was writing down children’s quotes that made me laugh (e.g. “Do roly-polies have family relations?”; “What do you want to be when you grow up? - A rocket!”).

When our oldest daughter was sixteen, she wrote a diary entry every single day for one whole year. Some of the entries simply listed what she did during the day or who she saw, others had some deeper reflections. When we asked her whether she experienced any effect from this practice, she noted that the days felt more distinct, and time felt less like a blur.

Paging through old diaries can reawaken memories that are seemingly lost, and more than an image, recapture the mood and mind of an earlier age. In these pages my ten-year old self recounts watching “Anne of Green Gables” for the first time, an inspiration that would lead me to move to Canada by the time I was eighteen.