Android calendars don't sync

I've had this crappy Moto E phone for a while and for quite some time, my laptop calendars and the android calendars synced locally using smooth sync for calendars. However, lately, and I don't know what changed, it's a mess. Particularly, if I enter new data like an appointment to my phone calendar, it doesn't sync to my laptop calendar so I have to enter data twice which is ridiculous. I've looked around here and elsewhere about sending stuff up to the cloud or itunes or elsewhere but I prefer to sync data locally and not for all the world to find. Thoughts?