On Nostalgia
I’ve always considered myself to be a self-proclaimed nostalgist. It never really mattered for what, who, when, where or why am I even thinking about this? I have a longing for things in decades or centuries where I wasn’t even alive. It’s taken me almost 33 years, 9 years of sobriety, multiple career changes, moving, running, searching, and yearning to realize that I’m not lost – I’m a finder.
I was born in Manhattan, and we moved to the suburbs of Chicago when I was 4 years old. From the time we lived there until I was about 12, I had this incredible sense of longing for New York. What was it like? Who would I be if we had stayed? In middle school, my parents dragged me (probably not an exaggeration) in the back of our car from Oak Park to East Kingston, New Hampshire. Our house came with goats. I still think about that a lot. The same questions ran through my mind. What did I long for? You guessed it, Oak Park. When my husband and I got married, we ended up moving down to the New York City area for work, and I had felt this amazing sense of “this is where we’re supposed to be, I was meant to go back.” Suffice to say, obviously we both missed New Hampshire, or else you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
One constant in my life has always been photographs. I can and will spend hours combing through them, as if I’ve never seen them before in my life. Going to my family’s house? Looking through photos. Going to my husband’s family’s house? Looking through photos. We recently compiled some photo albums for our 2.5-year-old son, who, like me, will sit for longer than with most things just inspecting each image. It’s not just ink on paper, it’s history.
Every photograph, like pages on a book, has a story to tell if you let them. It could be your family history, or someone else’s family history. It could be uncovering a photo of murals on the walls of a home that someone in town purchased, that this generation didn’t even know were there. It could be a snow-covered street where dogs used to race through town as a recreation activity. It could be a tree which is no longer standing, even though you know the exact spot its photo was taken. If we don’t uncover and share these things, those things disappear - unless a finder is able to unearth them and continue to pass them on to future generations.
I’m lucky enough now to have landed a position at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture. People call or email asking us about XYZ of the region, someone who lived here, genealogy, Thornton Wilder, or anything in between. I never realized that something that I thought plagued me my whole life could be a career and help people. When I first started working here, I was starting and running my own business, caring for our son, working two part time jobs, maintaining a partnership with my husband and sitting on the recreation committee. My plate was full, but full plates don’t always equate to happiness.
As I sit here writing this, I’m in awe. When we moved back to New Hampshire, we didn’t just find our home, we found so much more than that. We were welcomed into a community with open arms, and have embraced every aspect of it. Follow along as I dig through history, work on our local skate park, raise our children in the Monadnock Region, and settle into this way of life. Day by day, finding out exactly where we’re supposed to be.
