I am in a horrible mood today and wish I didn't have to cook up, serve, and clean up a Christmas dinner. But I keep reminding myself how important family time is.

Have you ever thought about how many Christmases you probably have left? It doesn't bother me as much about holidays, but when I think about gardening, I'm disgusted that I didn't start sooner, because every year is a learning experience, and I identify things to do different next year, but there are a limited number of next years.

The best part of our dinner today is the homemade cheesecake for dessert with a calorie-laden pecan sauce. Forget everything else. I just googled about whether it is supposed to served right out of the refrigerator - no.

My cheesecake recipe is crustless - we really don't miss that crust - for gluten-free reasons. I forgot to buy sour cream to mix with sugar and bake on for the topping, but that's okay because the sauce has butter, corn syrup, and heavy cream along with the pecans. Even if a person thought the cheesecake was not quite perfect, the sauce will transport them over the moon.

I was wondering if cheesecake is supposed to served ice cold or closer to room temperature so I googled it. I don't know how we lived without the Internet. Okay, I guess I do, we looked in a book if we had one and it would tell us, or we picked up the phone and called our friends and family and asked for advice. That's one of the casualties of our modern age: less human interaction. Without advice from somewhere, we just did whatever we thought best and didn't question our decisions until things went wrong or didn't work out. I experienced a lot of that during the flood last year.

And this has me thinking about the passage of time.

When I think of some major event that happened before I was born, World War Two for example, how people lived and what happened to them back then feels unrelated to the times I've lived in. But with the perspective of several 20 year segments behind me, I realize that 1965, when I was 14, wasn't that long after that war ended, so it was fresh in the minds of all those people who lived during the war. And look at the Vietnam War, when I was a young adult: a key event for my generation. On some levels it was a long time ago, but it's still fresh, and of course so many people are still dealing with the effects.

Back to our recent devastating flood: there was one just as bad in 1976, and 37 years later we were still talking about it. People would come to my property and ask me what that flood did to the river and the land, and the memories were still vivid. Now, the 2013 flood is already more than a year behind us, and I can see that the years will march on, although time and recovery efforts will address some of the damage. And an outsider will think 'that flood was years ago, but they are still talking about it like it was yesterday.' Yes we will be.