If you haven’t watched the movie Fried Green Tomatoes in thirty years, maybe you should let that stand–especially if you’re sentimental. You might shed a few tears at the end–seeing the sweet little town of Whistle Stop get swallowed up by time. The movie shows us that the places we grow up in, and that once were the stage where all of our days played out, eventually change. And the people who play all the roles in our movie will one day get lost to the past.

When I first watched that movie as a young mother, it didn’t have the same meaning for me as it does today. I wasn’t an experienced timekeeper then and I had no idea how fast the days would pass. When you’re young, you buy into the magical tale of permenance. And that’s a good thing, really.

What’s hard about growing older in this new world is the magnitude of change we experience in short bursts of time. It makes us older folks wish we could go back and eat a piece of pie at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I’ve been watching old movies and have been feeling whistful about the strangest things–dial telephones, small town hair salons, boxy television sets.

What I see in the faces of people from decades past is how expectant and excited they were about the future: gathered around the television set to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, or marveling at the first push button phone, or the new microwave in their kitchen–they had no idea how technology would evolve and how it would take over our lives. People were just beaming back then about the new world coming our way. They thought they were sending us a gift.

They couldn’t predict a platform like Tik Tok would emerge, or that a television series about naked people surviving in the woods would be allowed, or that our government would be able to zoom in on a book we’re reading in our living room from a satellite spinning in space.

They thought the set from Hollywood Squares was the future, and the cool tri-level Brady Bunch house was trendy. They believed the Newlywed game show was incredibly risqué and that Lucy and Desi sleeping in separate beds was silly but proper for television. But the Baby Boomers were living on the cusp of real change, and there was static electricity in the air–they could sense and feel the future was coming.

My father bought one of the first Macintosh personal computers in the early 1980’s with a dial up phone modem. He and my younger brother would sit in the attic trying to communicate with the few other people in the country who were doing the same thing. They were like young Teslas trying to scare up a patent for wireless electricity, ensconced in the attic together and only emerging for meals. My father was crazy for the future and embraced what personal computing might mean for his children. And here we are, some forty years later, the totality of human knowledge accessible on a computer no bigger than our hand.

Someone was telling me the other day how much there is to be optimistic about. People today are living better lives than ever before they said –we have comfort and conveniences prior generations could only dream about. But do we seem better to you? Happier? More content?

The question is subjective. It depends on the yardstick you use to measure happiness. I’m more on the Whistle Stop side of the tracks, believing tight knit communities, close families, small towns, and using our hands to create things makes for happier people. Local, rather than global, makes for a healthier earth. Nonstop shopping on Amazon and watching videos of cats doesn’t seem to be doing us much good.

Every five years, the Census of Agriculture collects data on land use and ownership, and their latest report attests that more than 140,000 farms were lost in the past five years. That’s roughly, in acreage, the size of Maine. All those Vermont and Midwestern and southern farms are disappearing. If you want to point to a culprit, you can point right to corporate farming. If more small towns see family farms replaced by larger operations with no connection to the community, it’s feared many towns will lose their identity.

The same thing is happening to farmers in Canada and all over the world–another change those beaming faces watching Neil Armstrong could never have anticipated.

In 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler described the effects of “too much change in too short a period of time” in his contemporary classic Future Shock. He predicted that people exposed to these rapid changes of modern life would suffer from “shattering stress and disorientation.” How right he was.

I try to live now by comforting routines–family, kitchen, farmstands. A flower garden. No television. Old movies. I’ve figured out that I feel better when I live more like my grandmother did.

And like the main character at the end of Fried Green Tomatoes, I sometimes feel like I’m sitting on my suitcase in Whistle Stop, now an old lady, wondering where my house went.