Near the small village of Montignac, France is a complex of caves called Lascaux. The walls of these caves have amazing primitive artwork dated to over 17,000 years ago. The artwork is primarily large game known to have lived in the area at that time. The artists 'signed' the paintings with their hand prints...extraordinary hand prints, reaching through time to tell us they were there and created the depictions. The hand prints
are far more extraordinary to me than the animals.
I was thinking about those very caves years ago when I decided to start keeping 
a zibaldone or hodgepodge book. Some of you may also know these as commonplace books. I've always been rather fond of the idea of leaving a 'memorial' to my children, a snapshot of who I am, my daily life, my hopes, dreams, passions - and the zibaldone was the perfect way to accomplish this.
The zibaldone is in essence an information management device, a way to keep a collection of loosely related ite
ms, a way to keep track, in 
hardcopy, of your life - quotations, thoughts, inspiration, poems, pictures, recipes, article snippets, life observations....each book is unique to it's creators perspective on his or her life.
I've been keeping one for many years, I've put some snapshots in this post of old ones and of my current one in one of my Traveler Notebooks. I have four children, and I know, one day, when I am gone, they will be going through my possessions and they will come across these books and will have something akin to those handprints on the walls of Lascaux, my effort 
to reach
through time and show them who I was, what I was about, how much I loved them and thought of them, those books will be my hand print.