Reflections and stuff.

     I've been thinking -- because it's new year's, you know, and that's what you're supposed to do -- and tonight I'm sitting on the basement floor up against the freezer paging through all my journals from 2016. This year I filled four. Four notebooks full to busting of silly girl emotions and angry explosions and questions about life, some with answers and some still waiting on it. Going back and reading through, it's like seeing everything laid out in a clean perspective. Sadness after losing people and the ends of long-term crushes and emphatic proclamations of love for Orry Main and Joel Fleischmann. Looking back, I wrote about freaking everything. You'd be surprised at a lot of the things I wrote about. I thought about sharing some here but it's not going to happen. That's too embarrassing.

    2016 was super weird and kind of awful and all in all the most exciting year ever. Even in my little world things changed and happened. I wrote three books and spent three weeks with my best friend and started driving all over the place and saw Hunter Hayes in concert and traveled far and wide, and lost some friends but found so many good ones. Then I bought a truck and wrote another book, and flew on a plane for the first time and rode on a roller coaster, and learned that "it's not what you take when you leave this world behind you, it's what you leave behind you when you go." {Randy Travis}

    In the big world beyond my farm I know there was a lot of tragedy. I don't know how many blog posts I've read and people I've heard say this was the worst year they remember. It's those people out there who've been hit hard and still look upwards that give me hope -- the ones who got flooded and banded together to help each other out and the ones who lost the people they loved most in the world and used it to bring truth and beauty to the world. The truth is I'm ridiculously blessed, and I think you are too. Because look. We made it through another year, we had good times in spite of it all, and here we're given another one.

The best parts were the sunny days, the long truck rides, the laughing over stupid things and being surprised by kindness and suddenly finding best friends and getting lost on dirt roads and screaming on the bleachers and dancing in the crowds.

     I don't know about this whole 2017 thing but I have the feeling it's going to prove itself a worthy challenge. What do you think? I'm looking forward to being employed and done with school and 18 so I can check out dvd's with my own library card. And maybe buying a new pair of boots. But we'll see how that employment works out.

   
     What was your favorite thing about last year?
     What did you do that you'd never done before?
     What are you looking forward to this year?

     ~Emma