Leaving Nostalgia in the Past
Sometimes even the recent past feels like my childhood home. It’s easy to idealize, yet hard to remember. If I was able to directly visit my past, in the same way I can return to stand outside the house where I was born, it would probably seem tiny and limited.
The time before my birth feels more like an abandoned vintage house, beautiful with age even when collapsing, forever mysterious. When I come across such a place, I feel the ghosts of others’ memories stir within it. I don’t feel haunted by those ghosts, which are largely just the fading spirit of loving people who did the best they could. Yet they remind me to leave nostalgia in the past, in favor of celebrating this moment.
It’s easy to look out at the troubled condition of the present world, and make an idealized claim that things are all falling apart. It’s easy to look at that abandoned house, and believe that it was built in a simpler time. Perhaps it even was, given that evolution tends towards complexity. Still, simpler doesn’t always mean sweeter. Older doesn’t always mean better. Not everyone or everything ages into wisdom.
I think of the pioneers who once inhabited this home, and others like it across the landscape. I’ve been and lived in such vintage houses, and they were drafty and cold, with primitive plumbing (if indoor at all), too hard to keep rodents out, too easy to burn down. I remember the Wild West context in which they were built, and it was not as romantic as an idealized Western movie. Resources were scarce, conflicts were many. People often had several children, expecting a few of them to die. Diseases ran rife. Medical care was rudimentary and limited. With travel as difficult as it was, options for leaving trouble behind were few. Travel mostly involved crossing perilous mountains and prairies in fragile wood wagons. War was as barbaric and present as ever, especially from the indigenous perspective. It was not paradise. It was not easier than the increasingly challenging life we have here in Oregon’s tinderbox woods now.
I’m reminded of the former settlement in the woods a wild mile above where I live, abandoned just over a century ago. That family came out in wagons from Michigan in the 1880s, a one-way journey that surely took months. When they arrived, they settled in to build a sawmill, a one-room schoolhouse, a few rough cabins, a bunkhouse for millworkers. They called it Paradise Hill. They had seven children here. Four of them died between the ages of three and thirteen. Their parents died too, so they buried six loved ones in a tiny, makeshift graveyard. The family finally gave up and left their dead behind. Paradise Hill was too brutal for survival. None of the buildings still stand. That abandoned cemetery is now defended by a tangle of brambles and fir trees.
Whenever I’m tempted to think new times are collapsing, I go visit that little cemetery, scrambling through the forest where almost no one goes, to reach it. I listen to the stories of the ones buried there. They could only dream of a life as abundant and free as the ones we have now, even in our new trouble and turmoil.
The eternally resting remind me: Ours is not the first climate to change. Ours is not the first democracy to crumble. The roots of our wars are far older than we are. We’re not the first to bury our children alongside our parents. We’re not the first to be ill, whether our illness is centered in body or spirit. We will not be the last to someday peacefully rest alongside them in the nurturing soil, when our own wars are inevitably over. It is just the nature of things.
I also look around at the century of new growth since these particular pioneers abandoned their “paradise” in pain, as the survivors moved on. It wasn’t abandoned by nature, which has filled in again with new forms of forest, even where the loggers’ harsh saws took down centuries of growth without regard. The land is thriving in new ways, recovering slowly without complaint. The earth has more time for healing than we do. The massive old fir that the pioneers chose as shelter for their family graveyard has died, and dropped its limbs on the headstones. Yet the new returning forest is as newly vibrant and green as anything called paradise.
When I visit the past, I’m never tempted to live there. I’m not tempted to flee this moment for some illusory better land of time. I don’t think there is one. I choose to stay, to celebrate what’s good within our current chaos. To make the best of it by doing my small, imperfect part to make it better. That will have to be more than good enough, because it’s all that’s ever been. I bury nostalgia in the earth alongside the pioneers, prepare to scatter my own mother’s ashes, and listen to the exquisite songbirds sing newly in the trees. I’m already looking forward to tomorrow’s coffee at dawn.