Time Capsule
Hometown glory.
Everything, for the most part, is exactly the same.
My parents just redid the hardwood floors, the latest of their home updates over the last several years, but the house I grew up in is still very much the same safe haven it always was. My bedroom, while painted and decorated with new furniture, still has remnants of my childhood: magnets I stuck to the metal closet doors, YA books that I can’t fit in my New York City apartment but also can’t part with. My bed frame still has the same recognizable squeak and the white ceiling fan the same gentle hum.
The rest of the house carries a comforting familiarity, too. My dad’s sprawling bookshelves line the basement walls, stacked with everything from comic books to classic novels to nonfiction deep-dives on highly specific topics (I proudly gifted him a book about parking a few years ago).
The wooden deck where my sister and I would be sent to shuck corn before dinners in the summer. The kitchen window where I’ve gazed at the backyard in every season (in upstate New York, there are roughly twelve).
I find everything there so peaceful now. Despite the endless loop of barking neighborhood dogs and lawn mowers, the sounds of my childhood neighborhood are basically a lullaby compared to the din of New York City. In the mornings, I stand in the front yard and take it all in: the sound of the breeze brushing against lush trees, the familiar bird calls that I could recognize anywhere.
The sky upstate is so sprawling, so unimaginably clear, that I once pulled over on the side of a country road to take a photo of the sun setting on the rolling hills. Years ago, I was in the car with my family during a trip home from the city. I couldn't stop craning my neck toward the car windows to get a look at the crystal blue sky above us. “Does the sky look absolutely insane right now to anyone else?” I asked, wild-eyed.
“No,” my sister, who was in the backseat with me, replied. “You just never see the sky.”
Visiting always feels like stepping back into my childhood for a moment. When Mark and I took a trip up last weekend, the nostalgia hit me harder than usual. Perhaps because I am at an age where I am considering having my own kids. Perhaps because I spent time with my some of my oldest friends and their children. Not only does being around people who have known me for so long cause me to revert, somewhat, back into my childhood self, but that weekend, I watched these sweet tiny humans growing up the exact same way I did. Sitting around my friend’s patio table, her two young daughters ran around the yard, giggling and scheming together. It was like watching my sister and I flinging ourselves around our acre of land, climbing trees and mixing mud potions until my mom called us inside for dinner.
All the while, another friend, who I have known since kindergarten, sat across from me cradling her newborn daughter. My two friends spoke about the local hospitals they delivered at, school districts, houses, diapers. I found myself surprised that I wanted in on this conversation. On the experience of giving my hypothetical children the same kind of childhood I had.
The next day, my sister and I stopped into our town library. Much like our childhood home, it has fundamentally stayed the same. We flipped to the backs of our favorite books to find the now-defunct check-out cards taped inside, confirming our suspicions: they were the very same copies we had taken out in our youth. How many kids had taken them out since? Would I someday take my own kid to that very library and read to them from the very same pages?
Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I like knowing that, at least for now, flickers of my childhood are only a 2.5 hour train ride away.