Becky Lukens sits comfortably in her tastefully furnished home in The Knolls of Oxford. She is dressed for summer: khaki pants and a short-sleeved white linen shirt. Her creamy bohemian-style earrings jingle as she laughs. She is almost 90 years old, but you’d have a hard time reaching that conclusion on your own.

Her book, “It’s Been Great!,” which hit the virtual shelves in July, is a celebration of life and family and a reminder to look back.

“I have always felt that I wished I knew more about my parents’ lives,” Lukens says. “And I must admit, ever since I read Little Women, I wanted to be a writer like Jo.”

Lukens even had her pen name planned: Josephine Peterson, after her mother’s middle and maiden names. And while she didn’t exactly follow in Jo’s footsteps writing plays from her attic sanctuary, Lukens has certainly lived a life worthy of a book all its own.

“I’ve led a very happy life and I wanted people to know that I had had a happy life,” Lukens says with a shrug.

A mother of four, she taught classes for an adult education program in Royal Oak, Mich. She taught at New York State College in Albany and St. Olaf College in Moorhead, Minn. When a branch of Ohio University opened in Chillicothe, she taught night classes there too.

In her book, Lukens tells stories about her life and her children. She also discovered in her writing a theme of feminism, a topic that connects her to her mother.

“There I am,” Lukens says, “kind of a feminist, and here’s my mother struggling with the same thing while I was a child.” Lukens says that the discovery brought with it a curiosity about what else was unknown about her mother, and gave her the motivation to write and publish her own stories.

She outlines her revolving door of projects in a section of her book called “Betty Friedan, I Beat You To It.”

“It wasn’t really feminism that was behind it. I hadn’t even read Betty Friedan at that point.” She looks up, smiling. “It wasn’t that I fought housekeeping; it’s just that it was kind of boring after a while.”

In 1964, when her children were all in school, she started teaching English at Miami University. When she didn’t like any textbooks about children’s literature, she wrote her own. That book is now in its ninth edition. She teamed up with a female provost at Miami to start an adult education program in the evenings. Lukens taught classes in women’s studies, women’s literature, and interpreting women writers. She also taught classes at the Institute for Learning and Retirement, including old age in literature, children’s poetry, and a class called Laughter for Health and Sanity.

“I just kept kind of poking along,” says Lukens as her foot mindlessly plays with a metal handle on her dark wooden coffee table.

The book is broken up into two parts: the first a revision of an earlier paperback collection of anecdotes, and the second, a collection called Marginalia.

“I started another pile of things about my life and my parents and my children and I called it Marginalia,” she explains. “And I thought, ‘if Henry James can write in the margins of his published novels, why can’t I write something called Marginalia?’”

And she’s not through yet. Lukens has another loose-leaf folder full of stories, and continues to write pieces for a writing club that she belongs to in The Knolls of Oxford. Her most recent was an anecdote about taking four children on a ferry across lake Michigan. An exclamation of “oh golly,” escapes a sigh as Lukens recounts the tale. But as far as a third part to her memoirs goes, Lukens says she’ll leave that for her kids to finish.

For now, the writing that Lukens does is just for her. She takes pleasure in writing and remembering, and in knowing that her children and their children will discover what it was like, as she says, “in my time.”

“I was just having a good time telling my kids about what life was like, and regretting that I hadn’t known more about my parents’ lives,” Lukens ruminates. “If you know anything about gerontology, you’ll find out that looking back is what old people do. There isn’t that much to look forward to: dinner, maybe a good television show, maybe a week from Friday one of the kids will show up, so what you do is enjoy memory. And I did a lot of that, and I still do.”

It’s Been Great! was published by Essential Absurdities Press and is available in hardcover from Amazon.com for $20.