Plus ca change...

As I was finishing up the video for my IPP, I thought I'd best show it to my mother and grandfather (the latter of whom is one of the two stars in the vid). My grandfather smiled delightedly as he watched himself onscreen, and my mother -

Well, my mother began to cry.

When I asked her why she was so upset, she told me that I was lucky to have my whole life in front of me, because that was her past on the screen: hers and her father's. "You have the future," she told me. "We only have the past."

Today, my mother was a witness at her father's remarriage. Looking at the photos of the happy couple, 83 and 85 years young, I thought to myself that they didn't look like people who only had the past. They were counting on a future together, too.

And later on today, as I read my classmate Amanda Hope's novel about her great aunt Rose (it's called Pieces, folks, and you should all go read it), I saw yet another example of a woman who continued to move forward her whole life, ready for the next adventure, never losing hope.

That's why I wrote my IPP. To show what amazing, forward-thinking people accomplished in order to get us to where we are now - and to remind us to always look forward and hope for a future, whether we're thinking two decades, two months, or two weeks ahead.