Notebook: Small Things From a Rainy Week

Not every thought becomes an essay. Some just need a page in the notebook. I keep a small one in my coat pocket for exactly this purpose, a soft-covered thing that has been rained on so often the pages have gone wavy. It is not for drafts or plans. It is for moments: a sentence someone said, a color I saw, a smell I want to remember. Most of them never go anywhere. A few of them end up here.

Here are a few from a rainy week in Portland. It rained every single day, which is not news in this city in October, but it was the kind of week where the rain felt less like weather and more like a mood the whole city had agreed to share. Everyone slowed down. I noticed more. These are the notes I did not want to lose.

Monday

The week started with a power flicker at six in the morning. The lights went out for about thirty seconds, came back, went out again, and then decided to stay on. In that dark half minute I heard the rain more clearly than I had in weeks. It was loud on the skylight, soft on the maple outside, and almost silent on the street. Three different sounds from the same storm.

I wrote: The rain has a different voice for every surface it lands on. Then the coffee maker beeped back to life and I forgot about it until I found the line later that night.

At the grocery store that afternoon, the cashier and the bagger were having a long, serious debate about whether a pumpkin is a fruit or a vegetable. Neither of them would back down. The man in front of me paid for his groceries and stayed to hear the ending. There was no ending. I left them still arguing.

Tuesday

A neighbor taught her grandson to whistle on the porch. It took forty minutes. They both cheered.

I want to say more about this one, because it is the moment I keep coming back to. I was at my desk, which faces the street, and I could see them across the way under the porch roof, sheltered from the rain. The boy is maybe six. His grandmother, Mrs. Abernathy, is somewhere past eighty and has lived in that house longer than I have been alive.

She would whistle a single clear note. He would purse his lips and blow and produce absolutely nothing but air. She would show him again. He would try again. Neither of them ever looked frustrated. They just kept going, patient as the rain, for forty minutes. I know it was forty because I checked the clock when I noticed them and checked it again when it happened.

And then it happened. A thin, wobbly note. He looked as if he had discovered fire. She threw both arms in the air and shouted something I could not hear through the glass. I clapped at my desk, alone, for no one.

The small things are the big things, written down.

Nora

Wednesday

A quiet day. I spent most of it inside, revising, and the notes are small.

• The library book drop was full, so someone had left a stack of picture books in a plastic bag tied to the handle, with a note that said “SORRY, RAIN.”
• A crow on the power line outside had something shiny in its beak all afternoon. I never figured out what it was.
• The smell of wet cedar when I took the trash out. I want to remember that smell exactly, and I know I won’t.
• My tea went cold four times. That is a record, even for me.

I don’t think any of these will become essays. But I like knowing they happened. A notebook like this is a way of saying to a day: I was paying attention to you.

Late that evening I tried to write a whole essay about the crow and its shiny prize, and it went nowhere. That happens. Not every small thing wants to grow up. Some of them are happiest staying exactly the size they are, a line in a wavy notebook that makes me smile when I flip past it months later.

Thursday

The ferry was late and nobody minded. Everyone just watched the gulls.

I had taken a day trip out to see an old friend who lives across the water, and coming back, the boat was delayed nearly half an hour by some problem on the dock. On a sunny day, I imagine people would have been checking their phones and sighing. But in the rain, under the covered waiting area, something softer happened. People sat. A man unwrapped a sandwich and shared half of it with his daughter. Two strangers started talking about the gulls, which were riding the wind above the pier without flapping once, just hanging there like kites.

Eventually, nearly everyone was watching them. Twenty or thirty people, quiet, looking up. When the ferry finally pulled in, there was a strange moment where no one moved right away, as if we had all forgotten we were waiting for anything.

Friday and the weekend

By Friday the rain had settled into a steady, comfortable drizzle that Portland seems to save for the end of the week. I walked to the used bookstore on the corner and stayed for two hours. I found a collection of letters with someone’s name and a date written on the inside cover in fountain pen: For Ruth, Christmas 1971. I bought it for four dollars, mostly for the inscription.

On Saturday the sky cleared for exactly one hour in the afternoon. The whole neighborhood came outside at once, as if someone had rung a bell. Kids on bikes, dogs on leashes, a man washing a car he knew would be wet again by dinner. Mrs. Abernathy’s grandson was on the porch, whistling. Badly, but whistling.

On Sunday it rained again, and I stayed in and wrote this.

Why I keep a notebook like this

People sometimes ask what the point is, if most of these notes never turn into anything. I understand the question. We are taught that writing should be productive, that every page should lead to a finished piece. But I have come to think of the pocket notebook as a different kind of practice. It is less like writing and more like breathing.

Here is what it gives me, over time:

1. A habit of noticing. When I carry the notebook, I look harder at things.
2. A bank of details. When I am writing an essay and need a real, specific image, I can flip back and find one.
3. A record of ordinary life. In ten years, I will be glad to know about the whistling lesson and the pumpkin debate.

Key takeaway: carry something small to write in, and write down one true thing a day. That is the whole practice.

If you want to try it, you do not need a special notebook. A folded index card in your wallet works. So does the notes app on your phone, if you are careful not to get pulled into everything else that lives there. The only rule is that you write it down while it is still fresh, before your memory smooths it into something more ordinary than it was.

The rain is supposed to continue all next week. I have a fresh page waiting.