Ducks @ Oregon - University of Oregon

Nostalgia

Katie D.

December 27, 2009 - 5:12 PM

This winter break, I have allowed myself to undertake several projects involved heavily in nostalgia. Any time I return home I undergo a process of rediscovering my childhood life. But this winter has progressed beyond the normal bittersweet meetings with old friends and review of all my old posters, books, CDs, and toys. This year has a different feel to it. This is my final year as an undergraduate, and this has somehow made me feel even more like this childhood home is something that truly exists only in the past. To add to this feeling of age, my little sister is back from her first semester of college.

It's a strange thing that not only have I become an adult, but my little sister has, as well.

So I decided on a couple of projects to take me down memory lane.

First, I went through my shelves and decided which books I would bring back to Eugene with me. I'm checking an extra bag on my flight back to Oregon this time around, so I'll have space for all that extra weight I've reluctantly left on the old bookshelves in my room. I looked through all the notebooks and mementos of my travels abroad, and decided those need to come with me, too. I've sorted through craft supplies and clothing and shoes and will take much of it home, and donate most of the rest to Good Will. I've even decided that it's finally time to take the decorative light switch plate with a picture of Han Solo on it and move it to the bedroom in Oregon. This is a radical step: something that's a part of the wall is coming with me. That means that Eugene is really home.

The other two projects are a bit more meaningful.

First, while in the mountains I finally began a project I've planned for years. I have innumerable journals which have been given to me by family and friends over the years. Several are far too beautiful to use for that purpose: there is something intimidating about writing a rough draft in a perfect notebook. So I brought one of these to the mountains, and am in the process of filling it with all my favorite poetry from the last four years. I am handwriting all of the most meaningful of the poems I have written between high school and college graduations. I don't blog about this much, but I have considered myself a poet since middle school, when I found that poetry was the best way to express the joys and pains of my life. Now I have a single repository for the most important writings of my college career. Some I consider to be examples of my best writing: poems that are well-crafted and which I would be proud to see published. Others are important for different reasons: because they reflect some moment of transformation or high emotion, or because they announce some specific event. It has been a wonderful process.

Finally, I created a Christmas present project that allowed me to re-encounter my favorite childhood memories. My gift to my little sister was two posters of childhood photos, plus over two hundred scanned pictures, selected from the thousands from our youth. I had never seen many of these pictures before. They have been sitting in a cardboard box for all these years (my parents are only medium on cameras in the first place, and wouldn't go near a scrapbook if their memories depended on it. Generally, I find this to have been of negligible inconvenience in my life). Now the pictures have been rescued, scanned, reprinted, and organized. They've even been posted on Facebook. It was a gift for my sister, but really it was an opportunity for me.

In the last two weeks, I have traversed a lifetime of memories. I've encountered stuffed animals I had thought were long gone. I packed some home items that I thought had belonged permanently to this Colorado home, but which I will now cherish in my Oregon home. I found hundreds of pictures from years long gone: swim team pictures, tree climbing pictures, pictures of dress-up, Christmas mornings, Easter dresses, old pets, sweet moments with grandparents and cousins.

Somehow this visit home feels a little different than the others. I am more removed than ever from most of my high school friends: the distance is too great and the years have allowed us to naturally grow apart. The old neighborhood in the suburbs is increasingly uncomfortable to me: it is more and more an affront to my new style of living. And, with my new plans to stay in Oregon for graduate school and perhaps even beyond, I feel more and more that my present and future both reside in the South Eugene Hills. "Home" is my Eugene friends, the deep green of Oregon forests, the Cascades instead of the Rocky Mountains, and the attitudes and activities I have adopted in the patterns of the Northwest.

This has been a healing time for me: a journey to an old home that has helped me to remember the love and joy of my years here, and has helped me to let go. I'll return to my new home armed with the trappings of my old life: the light switch, the notebooks, the literature. The photographs.