I never thought I’d be grateful that my husband shocked himself and simultaneously fried the hard drive on my computer last August – but I am. After Derek’s home improvement mishap, he managed to salvage important things, like family photos, from the computer and create a backup disk. This is a good thing because last weekend we returned from the lake to discover our 17-year-old son had annihilated Anabelle, the replacement computer I’d had for less than a year. Perhaps not everyone names their computer, but Anabelle and I spend so much time together that she feels more like family than an inanimate office instrument. She knows my darkest secrets, like my inability to spell “definitely” without spell check. She knows about my forays into fiction writing and the title of the memoir I’m going to write someday. She tracks the contact information of dozens of folks who wrote to me, eager to share their love stories in this newspaper. Unfortunately, she took those secrets with her after the crash and is now unable to give them up.
