I do wonder what will happen twenty or thirty or forty years from now after I'm either gone or incapacitated. Will my blog be pulled down by somebody? Will all my recorded thoughts, and feelings, and emotions be gone? I hope not…just the mere possibility of it is making me think that I need to take the time to print all of my posts and put them in a nice binder of some sort just so I can make sure a hard copy always exists. No matter how impractical hard copies are, something about their tangibility makes me feel better.
I just pulled down a hardcopy of a book that I bought my grandmother about ten years ago for Christmas. The book is called "The Heirloom Memories Book" and it simply asks a question and gives the person room to write his or her answer. It was meant to be read by future generations and that's exactly what I'm doing. My grandmother died in 2002 at the age of 87, but I have access to her thoughts because she took the time to record them. I just flipped a page open to this question: What was the most meaningful gift you ever received?
Here's her answer:
"I'll never forget my husband and my family—each one of them. My brother and sisters too. And my wonderful parents. My parents were good Christians. We were raised in a very good home. My Dad was a sharecropper all his life. We were very poor. But so was everyone else we knew, so we thought little about it until we got older. I really wanted to leave the farm. So did my two sisters and we finally did.
"My father was born in 1869 and died in 1936. My mother was born in 1872 and died in 1944. They met on a wagon train. One was from Kentucky. One was from Alabama.
"I had two brothers, Ed and John. My sisters were Edna, the oldest, then Mary Eva, and Modene (me).
"Yes, we were very poor. But the love we had from our parents made up for everything else. Every time the church doors opened, my parents saw that we were in church. My parents were hardshell Baptist. Soon that church moved to Little Rock, Arkansas because so many had passed away. Then we went to Center Point. Our Pastor for years was Brother George Johnson. Him and Dad were very good friends. Their beliefs were somewhat different.
"Our lives were like any family we knew. We worked hard in the field hoeing cotton and corn. We worked in the field when the temperature was 103. I started keeping the field when I was 6 years old. Mary and I did not do much work. But my parents taught me to work hard later. We loved each other very much.
"When we would fight among ourselves, Dad would look at us. We knew to stop. There was love in his eyes. He never had to say stop but once. There was always love in his eyes for everyone. I got by with much more than my brothers and sisters. I came along late in my parents' life. My parents said my brothers and sisters helped to [undecipherable word] me. I had a good life."
And now, even though my grandma never spent a second of her life on the internet, and she'd certainly never heard of a blog—her words are preserved online for all to see.
