Is it 2015 already?

It seems every year gets shorter. Is it really 2015? I just now got comfortable with 2014. Sometimes I think I haven’t really stepped into the twenty-first century. There’s nothing like having young adult children to make you feel like you are from the dark ages. Technology smiles on them and sticks its tongue out at us. After fighting with my laptop, time and again, I am considering going back to pen and paper.
My penmanship has deteriorated with arthritis in my fingers, so it is definitely easier to type, but considering I’m always having some technical difficulty, I may have to resort to writing things out long hand. I have a few journals I have hand-written but haven’t gone back and read them. I started keeping my notes on my computer in 2008. I am beginning to wonder if someday they will all disappear. Not that anything I’ve said will have any importance in history, I just want my great grandchildren to be able to read about our lives in the early 2000s.
I want them to know how we all walked around with little rectangular gadgets attached to our faces and how texting and driving was a strict no-no. They need to read about our sugar addictions and endless search for the fountain of youth. I’m tucking a few recipes into my memories so they can reproduce the family pecan pie and cornbread dressing. I’m sure they will laugh at our fashions and hairstyles, but I have no idea why.
I want them to know I loved their great-grandfather and their parents and grandparents. Life was good for us, despite what history might have recorded. We laughed when we were all together. We sang and cooked and played games during holidays. We cared about our neighbors, close and across the globe. We welcomed family through marriage, birth, adoption and simple bonds of friendship. We tried to make a difference.
I want them to know that their great-grandfather preached the gospel in the same little church I grew up in. It was my prayer as a little girl to marry a man who loved God. I want this love to be the legacy we leave behind.
If my great-grandchildren find my journals, I hope they can read the joy we experienced in 2014 as well as the sadness. Their great-great-grandmother, “Nana” passed away at the first of the year and the Melnick’s great great “Mama Myers” passed at the end. The memories of these fine ladies will live on in our stories about them.
Most of all, I want my future family to know there was good in the world when we lived in it. The big news media would have us think everything was about hate, prejudice and greed. History books might actually reflect this too. Call me an eternal optimist but I think we should put more emphasis on the positive.
If my grandchildren find my journals, whether hand written or preserved somehow in the cyber world, I hope they laugh and I hope their lives are as blessed as ours have been.
Happy 2015, Opelika!
Angie Brown is a humorist who loves being a wife, mother and grandmother. She lives in Opelika with her husband of 31 years and four of their seven children.