Perhaps the color of nostalgia is sepia or black and white, or the colors in the pictures hanging on painted walls. Maybe it’s the smell of the earth after a warm rain in the spring or the sound of an old song that makes your mind travel. Revealing slightly mournful memories that we’ve tucked away within ourselves. A sweet remembrance, a pining reverie, a homesick longing or a subtle blast from the past…
The feels of a previous place and time that made your soul sing, and your light shine…
Nostalgia. That bittersweet blessing that keeps popping up in our lives. Whether coated with sadness or fondness… It’s a feeling of wanting to go back to that time, even if for just a moment. Not because of the feelings of the present, necessarily, but because it was a time of such sweetness, such goodness. We long for the times that made us feel safe or abundant or stress-free… We long for the good times, the back-in-the-day times, the when-we-were-younger times.
I look in the corner of my eye at the picture that rests face up on the table. My sister and I smile at the lens of the throw-away camera, our congenial faces pressed together, our blue eyes glistening from the flash, our smiles big and bright. I sip my coffee. My blue eyes holding gaze of the two of us in that picture, and that moment, and that time. And I’m taken back, achingly so, to a time when life was a little more simple. When my sister was just a phone call away, when my sister was my sister. When there were no news headlines, or the worry of where she might be, or all the craziness of now. Ah, nostalgia.
Beautiful. Simple. Sometimes painful.
Byron and I took a walk on the beach, finding comfort from the waves and the sparkly sand. The new dunes led to a washed up mermaid shack, that now stands proud and tall, overlooking the choppy waters. It was adorned with washed up bouys and shoes, an old porcelain doll arm, painted signs and liquor bottles. A little love-shack that holds the memories of so many, tells a story of a million tales, decorated purely with the objects from other peoples nostalgia.
A barefoot man walked up to the nostalgic mermaid shack that we were frolicking in. He had driftwood and trash to add to the beach house of memorabilia. And the he continued to walk along the shore with us, as we all collected more washed up treasures to add to the shack. We talked about how much the beach has changed, the channel, the wildlife. He talked of fishing times from the decades before us, pastimes and how things used to be.
Sweet nostalgic moments, shared between strangers, which turn into memories. We parted ways, and Byron and I went back to the shack of memories. We contributed a lightbulb, a big old bottle, some rope… And some of our own nostalgic memories. I’d wondered if that barefoot man grew up with my mom. And I thought about my mom being healthy and happy again; I pictured her walking the beach and laughing. I remembered playing with her, walking with her.
Nostalgia crept inside of me this week, finding its own comfort in the pit of my soul and aching parts of my heart. When you’re served your earned portion of nostalgia, it can sometimes be a heaping, heavy dose. And for me, this week, it was. When these precious memories feel hauntingly painful and we feel them so deeply, we are genuinely overcome by the gratitude we have for a time we once experienced. Longing for that beautiful moment of time from our past because we are so grateful to have lived it.
That is nostalgia. And it is beautiful. We become faced with a nearly vulnerable sense of gratitude for our lives. Realizing that there is always something to be grateful for.
She comes in many forms, that sweet feeling of an untouchable pastime. Perhaps nostalgia comes in the shape of a person. Or a washed up mermaid shack on the beach. Whatever it is that serves each of us our heavy dose of nostalgia, and all its many flavors, the sweet chaser is our deepest gratitude for that time once passed, that time once lived. And in the future, the moments that we are living now will be the feelings of nostalgia…
♥
Missy Miller 
One response to “Nostalgia is served in heavy doses…”
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