Some of my fondest childhood memories are of sitting cross-legged on the floor of my great-grandmother’s living room, soaking in the stories she told of the “olden days”. Grandma would recount such tales as of swimming in the dead waters of the Cass River, back in the 1920s, and of the pet lamb that would follow her to the school house on the corner each morning. The only thing that could top listening to Grandma tell these stories was looking through the photo albums filled with old pictures, illustrating these stories of days gone by. In my young mind, the past was black and white, and I relished the experience of finding a faded photograph of some unknown relative, then hearing Grandma’s stories about the person. It brought the solemn figure in the photograph to life for me, and gave me a connection with the person long since dead. The old albums she had ended up in the hands of other members of our family, but her photo collecting inspired me to make albums of my own. Over the years, my interest in history and family lore made me the natural beneficiary of sepia-tone photographs others no longer had need of, and not just from my own family. Two albums, in particular, stand out in my mind, gifts from the families of deceased World War Two veterans, whose snapshots documented their long and eventful lives. I also have a couple of albums filled with old pictures of my hometown, Cass City, Michigan. When I long for the comforts and familiarity of home, I sometimes pull these albums out and comb through their pages, even though most of the people and events occurred long before I was born. Somehow, it makes me feel connected to a simpler time and place. A couple of years ago, I came across a word that accurately describes this feeling. Anemoia is defined as “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known”. That’s the feeling exactly. In a video describing this word, the narrator elucidates this feeling: Looking at old photos, it's hard not to feel a kind of wanderlust—a pang of nostalgia for times you've never experienced. The desire to wade into the blurred-edge sepia haze that hangs in the air between people who leer stoically into this dusty and dangerous future, whose battered shoes are anchors locked fast in the fantasy that none of it risks turning out any other way but the way it happened. It’s surreal to think that, generations from now, people will look back on the pictures and videos we are taking, and say, “What simple times they were. If only we could go back.” Indeed, He has made our days as handbreadths (Psalm 39:5).
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AuthorTy Perry is a writer and blogger living in metro Detroit. Archives
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