Nostalgia

We took a family trip back home recently. But every time I say back home, I find myself wondering what that even means. What is home?

My dad died years ago. My mom remarried and moved out of my childhood home. Someone else lives there now. The house that held so much of my childhood isn't ours anymore. People say home is where your family is. But I don't know if I agree. For me, I think home has become something harder to define. It's less of a place and more of a collection of things that spark memories of another time.

I grew up with berries growing in our backyard. It was such an ordinary part of my childhood that I don't remember ever thinking much about it. They were just there. But that's the funny thing about nostalgia. We rarely know which parts of our lives we're going to miss while we're living them. We don't know that something as simple as berries growing in a backyard will someday make us ache for a place and a time that no longer exist.

I took a photo of my son on this trip that immediately made me think of my brothers. Not because anything important was happening. Actually, it was the opposite. It reminded me of being kids and all of us crammed into the bathroom together while my brothers shaved or showered or got ready. Nobody thought anything of it. We were just there, talking and bothering each other and going about our lives. At the time, those moments were completely insignificant. Now they're the ones I remember.

Another photograph brought me back to all the time we spent simply sitting around our house. Reading. Talking. Doing our own things in the same room. Nothing remarkable was happening. There wasn't a reason to take a photograph. And yet somehow those are the moments that have become home to me. Maybe that's what I find so fascinating about nostalgia. The memories that pull at me the most aren't necessarily the birthdays or Christmas mornings or big family events. They're the ordinary things.

Some of the photographs from this trip are at the beach. Those memories are different because they don't take me back to my own childhood. They take me back to my children's. When my kids were little, we would spend time at the beach with my husband's grandfather or my husband’s parents. And now here I am, standing on a beach with children who aren't little anymore. There is something strange about watching your children grow up in places where you can still so clearly see the little versions of them. You look at them as they are now, but somehow, you can see all of them at once. The child who played on that beach. The person standing in front of you today. And all those years in between.

Home used to be easy. It was an address. It was the house where my parents lived. My dad was there. My mom was there. My brothers were there. My things were there. I could point to it. Now I can't. That version of home doesn't exist anymore. But pieces of it do. They exist in berries growing in a backyard. In watching my son and suddenly seeing my brothers. In a quiet room where everyone is sitting around doing their own thing. In a beach where I can almost see my children running around as little kids again. Maybe home isn't one place we spend our lives trying to get back to. Maybe we collect homes as we go.