Sifoddling Along

By Marilyn Carnell

January is not the longest month, but it seems that way. Here in Minnesota, it is day after day of freezing weather. The days are getting longer, but it still feels as though we are shrouded in darkness for too many hours. But January is also a time of new beginnings – an opportunity for a fresh start on projects, visiting with friends and family. Even those many miles away are now accessible by phone or computer. We do live in miraculous times.

Mankind seems to have an innate urge to record or mark events and things they want to remember or observe. We are still discovering examples of their efforts - pictographs in caves and stones, medicine wheels, modified message trees, knotted strings used for accounting – the list goes on and on. We continue to follow that urge, adopting change at a faster and faster rate.

I don’t make a list of New Year’s Resolutions, but I do intend to finish the book I began writing more than five years ago. It is about the Civil War in southwest Missouri. Coping with the changes I experienced after moving into a senior living apartment last February and dealing with the chaos of daily news filled my time. I couldn’t get my head back into the 1860’s with the ease I once had. The book is my version of a cave painting – a picture of a young woman’s life of struggle for survival when the world around her collapses.

My generation growing up in the southwest Missouri Ozarks is the last to have experienced a lifestyle little different from the times following that dreadful conflict. It was as if time stopped for nearly 100 years. As the youngest child of two youngest children in their families, I grew up hearing the last remnants of Elizabethan English commonly spoken, the colorful colloquial expressions and a lifestyle that had one foot in the 1800’s and the other in the twenty first century.

My parents learned to write with a chalk stick and slate. I started school with a Big Chief tablet and a #2 pencil. My grandchildren casually use computers and cell phones in everyday life.

The year 2026 will hold enormous changes that no one can predict. I can only hope that they will draw us together to face them with resolve.

Happy New Year!