How did I organize my materials? I have to say that the book began ten years ago when I quit working in real estate and property management. We moved from California to Colorado, where we lived for two months in an apartment. My husband took the only car to work for 14 hours a day, so I had no job and no car and no interest. I’d been contemplating filing a stress case at the prior job, and I was recovering from an awful work experience. (I’m not playing the victim. The job was high-stress, low-pay in a hostile environment, and I had only half the coping mechanisms that I have now.) Anyway, I had nothing better to do than to sort through whatever journals had survived the years, along with the scraps of paper stuck inside those journals with various notes to myself. I had a computer, and I transferred all the hand-written stuff onto word processing, without editing or stopping to think. I was, for the first time, not censoring or critiquing my words or myself. I just copied. When I was tired of that I would make lists pertaining to what I copied. For example, if I’d come across a diary of the house in New Jersey, I would sit quiet and allow myself to contemplate what else I remembered. Sometimes I would concentrate on the scene and draw a floor plan of the house. Then I would list the contents, without making sentences. For a break I would take a walk. Just walking without expectation of exercise was also new to me. When my husband’s manager development program ended in Denver, he was transferred to Dallas.