Question 7: What do you keep lists of?

Question 7 (Grammatically correct version): Of what do you keep lists?

I saw five deer on my run this morning so when I got home, I wrote it down. I also wrote down my running splits from this morning. Earlier in the week, I marked in my planner that I went to Tandem with which friend (Natalie) and what I ate (Dark Chocolate Banana Waffle). I hope tomorrow to write down that I skied.

There are many parts of life that I like to keep track of. Besides deer, running times, Tandem dates, and ski sessions, I keep a list of books I’ve read and books in my reading queue. I have a list of people I’d like to have over for dinner and a list of restaurants in Greenville I’d like to try. I have my master Lake Invite List of all the friends we’ve hosted over the years of being at the lake and the meals I served our guests. That is a really fun list to go back through, and I often do reference it if I’m trying to cook something different when hosting people we’ve had before.

I have the kids’ (and my own) memory work lists, and of course, there are always the grocery lists. Oh, the grocery lists that I do love to make! For a long time, we kept a list of how many eggs our chickens were laying daily. But alas, TJ made me stop that list.

One of my favorite lists to keep is my Letter Log, which sounds fancier than it is. It’s just a list of the letters (date, to whom, and what card or stationery I used) that I’ve written since March 2015 when I started my one year of writing letters. I wrote a blog post about that here and another related post here if you’d like to know more about it. The yearlong project ran from March 9, 2015, to March 8, 2016, and included 366 letters because 2016 was a leap year. As you will see below, my friend Sarah Hamilton got the first and the last letter of the project because she inspired me to do it. (I miss you, Sarah!!)

After my project ended, I stopped writing a letter every single day, but I didn’t stop writing letters, nor did I stop keeping a record of the letters I had written. I started over with #1 a few days later in March of 2016, and as of today, five and a half years later, I have written 653 more letters for a grand total of 1,019 letters since March 2015. (I feel like I just won Jeopardy and my winnings were tallied.) Prior to March 2015, I didn’t keep a Letter Log, but since I have written letters consistently since childhood, let’s just say my Jeopardy winnings would be a lot higher.

To have written over 1,000 letters in the past six and a half years is very, very meaningful to me. That is a lot of life lived and recorded and given away, and it fills me with joy to think about it. I am very thankful I started keeping my Letter Log all those years ago because the list proves I lived and did this.

Not many people will ever know or care that I’m a letter writer, or a list keeper, or a deer stalker, or a water skier, or a Tandem lover. Our lives are so little, but little things can mean so much. And counting the little things feels like a way for me to count my life, to honor it, and be grateful for it.