Essay by Sharon Tosto Esker

What You Grab When Your House Is on Fire

I flashed a smile over my shoulder at my parents before tossing my over-stuffed L.L. Bean backpack onto the airport security belt. Then I saw my mother’s panicked face. She started rummaging through her black purse.

“Wait!” she yelled, running past at least a dozen confused travelers in the security line.

As she stretched across a nylon barrier, she held out a pocket-sized maroon notebook. I grabbed its spiral end.

“Write everything,” she said, “so you don’t forget anything.”

It was April 1993. I was leaving for my first trip to Europe, heading to Paris with my high-school French class—my first plane ride without my family.

That month, I wrote nothing profound in that maroon notebook, just the exclamations of an almost 17-year-old girl. But it was the beginning of my habit of recording all important—and not so important—life events.

“You’ll be able to share it with your kids someday,” my mother said.

My earliest memories place her at the kitchen table with a stack of newspapers and magazines that surpassed the height of the bananas in the fruit bowl. Every morning, she would dip into the pile and come up with an article; with three kids racing from one activity to another, she never indulged in the luxury of reading a whole magazine or newspaper. Her favorite pieces—always crumpled around the edges—would end up on the refrigerator door.

Sometimes, she’d clip stories meant to inspire us: a biography of a ballet dancer, a traveler spending a year in a foreign place, a decision by the Supreme Court’s first female justice, or a reflection on a bad breakup.

“You’ve got to read this,” she’d bark.

She never handed me a page; she just slapped the fridge door, where a clipping would be secured with a magnet, letting me know where it was.

My mother met my father when she was 14, married at 22, and had me—her first child—at 24. She hadn’t gone to college yet, but she desperately dreamed of it. She felt she didn’t have a lot of interesting experiences to share with us. So she sought out experiences in black and white to show us what our futures could look like.

As I prepared to take that first step toward my own future—jetting off to a city I had read about on our family’s refrigerator door—I knew I had to write.

Today, next to my bed, I have a stack of black leather-bound notebooks. The previously blank white pages are bursting with words, sketches, ticket stubs, postcards, prayer cards from funerals of loved ones. I keep these journals there, because they’re what I’d grab if my house were on fire.

Each page chronicles details of a day’s events over the last 18 years. I can flip through my past and conjure each moment described. Here’s what I scribbled in May 1997, as I sat in a dark subway car on a Paris Metro during a bomb scare:

The subway car jerked to a halt, and I can hear everyone breathing short breaths. No one is moving. A woman to my left has started to cry, and I can feel the tears coming. Hail Mary, full of grace.

My hands shake when I read the following from September 11, 2001, the ink smudged in various spots from my tears:

We were in a team meeting, when our secretary walked in and said, ‘The Pentagon’s been hit.’ I felt panic seize my chest. The director told us to follow protocol for disasters. I didn’t even know there was a protocol for disasters. All I could think about was getting out of my building. If a bomb hit downtown Boston, the whole city might collapse.

Tears of happiness have also fallen on my journal pages. On June 26, 2008, after dozens of failed tests, I was pregnant:

For years, I prayed, cried and remained hopeful that I would be able to conceive the tiniest of gifts. And now, that moment is here. Every month I longed to see that second line and there it now was. It was faint, but there.

On the day my husband and I brought our newborn son home from the hospital in March 2009, I scribbled:

We ate roast beef sandwiches as Harrison watched us from his car seat on the floor.

My mother was right. I don’t want to forget these moments, mundane or dramatic. My journals help me to see how far I’ve come, what I’ve accomplished, what I’ve weathered.

One day, my mind and memory may fail me, as my grandmother’s slipped from her tender grasp. Before she passed away on July 14, 2007, I wrote:

Gone are the stories of her racing down Lewis Street in Boston’s North End on her roller skates with ball bearings. She isn’t able to remind me of how she would tuck her cold toes under her younger sister’s back when she got into bed as a child. And I will never get to hear her tell me how much she loves me again. She doesn’t recognize my face as her oldest grandchild anymore.

But I have all my notebooks, including that spiral-bound, maroon one my mother handed me as I boarded my first trans-Atlantic flight.

After shimmying down the 747’s narrow side aisle back in 1993, I settled into a window seat and watched the baggage being loaded into the underbelly of the plane. As my stomach churned, I turned my eyes downward to the crisp, light-blue-lined pages of that maroon notebook and wrote in my Catholic-school cursive:

I’m off! My dream of going to Paris is finally coming true.

Sharon Tosto Esker is a writer and mother to an energetic two-year-old. Her journals have clean, crisp, white pages so she can write, sketch, and tape in postcards and other mementos without being bound to any lines. Her journal of choice is a 5" x 8" Moleskine notebook.

In the spring of 2011, Sharon received a master’s in journalism from the Harvard University Extension School, where this piece began as a “Why I Write” essay in a class taught by Martha Nichols.

For more of her writing, please visit Sharon’s blog Un Soupçon de Moi.