On the hammock at the farm with my Mum and sister – precious moments, vividly remembered.
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“Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.”
The Hours, Michael Cunningham
As an avid daydreamer, hopeless nostalgic and natural storyteller, I am rarely in the moment.
On bad days, my overly-active imagination and anxious mind are difficult beasts to tame, pulling me forth into the future where I run through every possible worst-case scenario in acute detail.
This is how I’ll feel when I lose this loved one. When I forget to turn the iron off and the house burns down. When that innocuous little mole near my belly button turns nasty. When the road toll becomes personal.
When, when, when. There are countless variations, always followed by elaborate preparation. How will I cope? What will I do? Intricately planning, as though I can somehow prepare myself for an entirely-imaginary scenario that will most likely never happen (touch wood).
Thankfully, there are also happy interludes in my imaginary future.
A home in the country with a cool verandah that catches the breeze and soaring gum trees filled with birds. A little brown-eyed boy with a mischievous giggle who looks just like my husband. Sun-soaked memories that smell like sea and salt made in a campervan we don’t yet own. And the simple privilege of growing old – smile lines, silver hair and all.
Amidst the uncertainty and fragility of life, these imaginings fill my heart with hope; a reason to blunder on despite all I have to lose and all that is so relentlessly out of my control.
Just as often as I find myself living in the future (perhaps even more so these days), nostalgia pulls me backwards. I stop almost dead in my tracks, perfectly still, as memories reach out and whisper, ‘Remember when?’ In some strange way, these visions are almost more vivid than the here and now. Perhaps because life back then was spacious and unplugged; the world content to just be in one place at a time.
Just the other day, I doing the washing and suddenly there I was, smack bang in the Buffalo General Store, around the corner from Nan and Pa’s farm where I spent much of my childhood.
The smell of leather and newspaper ink. The swing and slap of the flyscreen door behind me. That one creaky floorboard on the walk to the counter, where Sue would wait with her big rimmed glasses and wide smile. The 10c lolly jar full of teeth. And shiny new boots lined up beneath the newspaper stand, where the latest, longed-for edition of Horse Deals sat waiting.
From there, my sister and I would grab our bikes and ride to the neglected tennis courts at the community hall – gusts of wind whipping tendrils of hair against our rosy cheeks. And the Parkes boys would emerge from their old house and clamber in single file under the cyclone fencing, their gleeful little faces lit up as they happily resumed the role of ball boys. Little Gareth was my favourite, that delightful little boy mix of mischief and sweetness. For me, he is frozen in time, all freckles and grazed knees, still alive in that moment. And yet now he would be a young man, with his own life, career, joys and struggles, perhaps even children of his own.
This vivid nostalgia is not just reserved for childhood memories. I found myself inexplicably sentimental about leaving behind my grotty old keyboard when I left my corporate job, and I have fond memories of a thoroughly-ordinary park bench where I nutted through a particularly stressful time in my life. On leaving it, I felt the need to take one last lingering look backwards, wanting to catalogue the minutes I’d spent there – how it looked and smelt, how I felt in my bones as I sat and pondered, wishing things were different, watching the sunset turn the poplars down by the creek gold. Why this need to remember, ingest, embody? Perhaps simply to prove that it happened, that I survived.
When my mind transports me back to these moments, life as I know it transforms. In a way, it’s like standing alone in a vast open paddock, the huge expanse of sky above full of possibilities and nuance, the sheer scope of human experience almost touchable before me. I used to get frustrated with this inner showreel and my tendency to get so lost within it; dismissing it as overly sentimental, a distraction, perhaps a means of avoiding real life with all its risk and vulnerability. And yet our vivid inner worlds are perhaps the one true window into our souls; an intricately woven fabric of personal stories. They remind us who we are, where we’ve come from and why we’re alive. Every moment becomes a new stitch in our story. In a literal way, yes, the past is over and done with. And yet, in us, it remains alive and well, vivid as ever, always enduring.
I see this at play in my dear Nana as Alzheimer’s does its best to disorientate and confuse her. She has good days and bad days, but slowly she is losing the concept of time as a linear notion. Early memories come forth easily and alive, the present is often confusing and intangible, and in many ways, the future is entirely irrelevant.
Alzheimer’s or not though, we all flit back and forth – sometimes deliberately, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes we even manage to straddle the divide between both, engaging in a conversation while our mind simultaneously carries us a million miles away. In this sense, we are all strangers to each other – adrift in spaces between, living in a vortex of memories, regrets, imaginings, words unspoken. Very rarely fully present. Our tendency to timehop is almost akin to life in a chronological washing machine. Without warning, we get tossed to and fro on a violent spin cycle – a kaleidoscope of past, present and future.
Perhaps most beautiful of all are those rare moments of respite when we catch ourselves mid-loop, and time somehow stands still.
Anchored just for a second, silence settles all around us, our consciousness zooms right out like a camera on a drone and from above we can look both backwards and forwards, pulling all our loves, losses and hopes close, somehow holding in our tightly-clasped hands every single moment that has ever happened, and also – inexplicably – everything to come, before whoooosh, it slips through our fingers like sand, the spin cycle resumes and time charges on.
