This morning my writing sent me from beginning a fresh draft of a new chapter in my memoir to my notebook so I could hand-write a section that felt too tender to write on the computer. A paragraph or so into the piece, I shied away from going deeper and, sticky-noting the page in my notebook, went back to the loose-leaf binder where the draft resides and decided before I could go any further, I needed to research the actual route I took from London to Tiel, Netherlands, but memory was handing me “Utrecht,” so I had to go to my original journal to confirm whether Tiel was the location of a scene I intended to write and there, in my decades-old journal, I discovered it was Tiel and I got there via Utrecht but before I could settle in to write, memory took over again and next thing I knew I was in Amsterdam. Now, having put the whole thing away, I’m at my desk eating trail mix and apple slices wondering where the morning went.

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