Nostalgia. I love looking back.  I remember the patterns on my Grandmother’s dishes, sometimes I see a cup and saucer just like that in an antique store,  I never purchase them, somehow just looking and enjoying the mental scene they evoke is enough.

There was a wooden clock on her sideboard that donged out each hour.

 A garden of flowers , beans, and potatoes.

The colors in her front room, and her massive fern plant sitting on a table.

I often watched her cook and bake and that was where I learned nearly everything I know about cooking, and especially about waiting ’til she was done, so I could lick the spoon.

My Dad, cooking the Christmas turkey. Fighting with my siblings over the drumstick.

The Maple trees in our own front yard.  

Lovely pets that remain forever in my heart, their short life span over way too soon for human hearts to bear.

Old friends that I have lost track of, or as my parents have, gone on to another realm. Always missed. 

The part of my heart that evokes the emotion of nostalgia is to me a dream-like place I like to visit , but I cannot stay long with old memories or pieces of clothing from a loved one.

Time pushes at us mercilessly.

Old photos from long ago school days become pictures of strangers unless we wrote their names down on the back, then we remember them.

I do miss small towns, streetcars, pretend cigars and cigarettes, Xmas window displays in Eaton’s, playing games on the street until the street- lights went on.

Through the magic of the internet and Google maps I looked up my childhood home. i wish I had not. It was so different.

Half the yard  with the second big maple was gone.  Another house stood in their place.  Our house, now stuccoed and white, so different from the brown shingles of my childhood.

New sidewalk and paved street, a horse and cart used to deliver ice down that old road and a milkman delivered milk.

 I got my first kiss in front of that house.

Everything is gone now, except for memories.

How I cherish them, these are the times I miss and all that came with them.    

Written by Barbara Smith.

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