I was in the third grade when I started keeping diaries. I have all of my diaries. I have shoeboxes filled with every letter I’ve received. I have a stack of screenplays, a file of “ideas,” a half-written memoir about an elderly potter and the year I took lessons from him. It’s a graveyard of sorts. A garden of the half-baked, ill-conceived, and woebegone.
What’s in your garden.
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Betsy Lerner 
Poetry that blossomed too early and got zapped by a heavy frost. Stories that are as real as heartbreak with roots that reach many feet below the surface. A novel about clouds. Words scattered like seeds on parched earth, needing rain followed by sunshine to have any chance of growth.
Let it rain!
Records: Twenty-three Steno pads of 50 years of engineering notes, eight more of writing journals, and all safely collecting dust/mildew in boxes down in the basement.
I journal on the computer now, probably three times as much as before. But I worry about a system crash. That’s become a modern fear of what dust/mildew would be today.
A YA novel that remains unfinished because they haven’t let me know yet if it ends in death or life. Several children’s books. Poems I have chosen not to share. Tears and joy and other emotions I had nowhere else to put. Scraps of paper inscribed with words I overheard in conversations I was not meant to hear that were just too rich to let go of. Snippets of ideas written on the back of envelopes that meant something to me once that I can’t (or maybe won’t) let go of. You know, the usual writer stuff.
Same sort of thing. Stories started but never finished. Anguished complaints about long ago sacked lovers.
Old drafts of manuscripts for when I’m famous and someone wants to write about my early years. Maybe writing diaries. When I downsized, I tossed lots of stuff. I have many archive files on the computer to mine when I run out of new ideas. I keep re-identifying myself and the old me seems like a dream. I say goodbye as I let it float off.
When I downsized I too tossed tons of stuff. I was like finally sneezing away congested thoughts.
Three novels, dozens of short stories and hundreds of essays and a bunch of journals, one of which chronicles a year of – being broke – a man knocks on our door – and a year later we have over a million dollars. Sure would make a great movie.
A house, two college educations, and two weddings drained the coffers fast. Though it was life changing, money like that should come with directions. And yet, mine is a no regret garden that still blooms magnificently.
Books. Mostly.
Mementos of stuff since I started writing. Cards, little knick-knacks and do-dads given to me. Paraphernalia that means nothing to anyone. A stack of 45s . . . and more books. Books galore. If I had kept them all, we would need storage space.
I wish I had the ONE diary that I wrote in intermittently from the time I was eight until I was twenty-one or so. Left it in the top of a closet when I was getting my divorce.