In January, some people start a bullet journal, build a spreadsheet, or download an app to get their lives in order. Every year for Christmas, I ask for a bird calendar. Yes, I am one of those stuck-in-the-past people who still consult actual calendars—the kind made with paper and staples—rather than relying on my phone like a normal person in the 21st century. I hang it on my refrigerator, right between the Mother’s Day card Younger Son made for me when he was five years old and a chip clip holding a yellowed Non-Sequitur cartoon from when we had our house remodeled in 2004. The cartoon pictures the devil giving a man an option of either burning in hell for all eternity or living in his house while it’s being remodeled. (That’s a whole different blog subject.) From my refrigerator, my calendar brightens my kitchen with a glorious photo of whatever bird graces that month—cardinals, bluebirds, bald eagles, and other feathery friends.

By December, the calendar has been flipped so many times and become top-heavy with turning up the old months that I have to add more magnets to keep it from sliding off the fridge. So, it’s genuinely thrilling to start the new year with a fresh calendar with unwrinkled pages, undented months, and no suspicious sticky residue holding anything together. Clearly, it takes very little to make me happy. My bar for joy is pretty low.

Every time I walk into the kitchen, I not only get to appreciate the bird picture, but I can also tell what’s coming up in my life at a glance, without unlocking a phone, opening an app, and getting distracted by fifteen notifications about things I didn’t ask my phone to think about. It’s efficient, unless you count the emotional toll of realizing that the vast majority of my calendar squares are now filled with doctors’ appointments instead of fun social events. Apparently, this is what getting older looks like. Less “Girls Night Out” and more “Girls Night in Because We All Have Fasting Blood Work at 7:30 AM.”

For Christmas, Younger Son gave me a new calendar, and I dutifully sat down to fill in my 2026 schedule. For me, the problem of a doctor’s office handing me a reminder card for my next appointment, which falls in the next calendar year, is that there is no place to mark it on this year’s calendar. So, I either write it in the small blank area at the bottom of December, or—like this year when I ran out of space—attach sticky notes to the bottom of December like I’m building a paper tail on a donkey at a kid’s birthday party. And yes, it looks as pathetic as it sounds.

Even more pathetic is that I have something coming up every month. Sometimes two or more appointments per month. I don’t get a month off from doctors. Somehow, that doesn’t seem fair. Shouldn’t there be some sort of doctor-free holiday month where all healthcare professionals agree to leave us alone for thirty days so our insurance deductibles can catch their breath?

And those are just the appointments that I remember to write in. I inevitably miss a couple, and then I’m surprised when the reminders show up in my email or texts like uninvited bill collectors. Please don’t tell me I wouldn’t have this problem if I simply entered the appointments into my phone or computer as soon as I received them. That would involve technology, which takes approximately 700% more effort than writing something on an actual calendar. Plus, those appointment pop-ups are relentless. Every time I’m working at the computer, I get notification pop-ups for Hubby’s appointments, interrupting my train of thought, which is easy enough to derail as it is. They start five days before the appointment and repeat constantly like a car alarm stuck in “panic mode.” Since he’s as old and decrepit as I am, it’s basically like watching a digital whack-a-mole of medical alerts.

Some people measure their years in accomplishments. Some measure them in memories. Me?

I measure mine in completed doctors’ appointments and magnets because without them, everything would hit the floor, including me.