Ever since she was a little girl, Maud kept a journal.  And 109 years ago today, she explained the very reason she started one.

Monday, May 12, 1902,
Echo Office, Halifax

Today I’ve laughed more than I’ve done for a month together.  I’ve been re-reading “A Bad Boy’s Diry”.
That book is responsible for you, my journal.  ’Twas from it I first got the idea of keeping a “diry”.  When I was about nine years old Mr. Fraser, the Cavendish school teacher, who boarded at our place, had the book.  I think I regarded it as a classic then.  I read it and re-read it and promptly began a “diry”.  I folded and cut and sewed four sheets of foolscap into a book and covered it with red paper.  On the cover I wrote “Maud Montgomery’s Diry”.
Years ago I burned it in one of my iconoclastic fits.  It was a pity, for it really should have been preserved as one of the curiosities of literature.
The “bad boy” was, of course, my idol.  He spelled almost every word wrong; therefore so did I of malice prepense.  He was always in mischief and wrote accounts of it in his diary.  Although not very mischievous by nature, being bookish and dreamish, nevertheless I schemed and planned many naughty tricks for no other reason than that I might have them to write in my “dere diry.”
But I had never seen the book since then and had forgotten it so completely that it was new to me.  I just howled over it today for it was absurdly funny still—even funnier than I used to think it, I imagine, for I took it quite seriously in those days, when I made a hero and model out of “little Gorgie.”

If you keep a diary, what is the reason you started writing in one?  What are your plans for your journals – do you intend for anyone to ever read them?