the power and value of things and place.” (RD)
Had the grandsons over yesterday for their first visit here in 2 1/2 years. I knew, in advance, that this would be a powerful experience, their returning to our house and yard to rediscover missing pieces–reclaiming and reliving a past that was once a happy, familiar haven once every week or two weeks before the pandemic started.
I gave each (7 and 10) a tour of every room in the house which they thoroughly enjoyed, recalling where they had played, things that had happened and remembered plus acquiring new information to questions they asked.
Based on my own past, I recall well what it felt like to return to old places years later and the kinds of mental, emotional, and spiritual connections that occur.
As for things, there is nothing quite like reconnecting with objects that once gave one pleasure, especially pieces of childhood experience, whether via toys or activities involving things. (Think Rosebud in Citizen Kane.) We are all moved by certain images that evoke happy/happier/missed/missing times.
There is nothing like playing bird sounds from an audible bird book or playing a metallophone. Or seeing a picture on a big bed where you once slept. Sensations suddenly and memorably re-lived.
Things–too often the once-precious, meaningful things given away, disparagingly and casually disposed of, or thoughtlessly sold in a garage sale. Too often what we fill our lives up to enrich our imagined needs or compensate or refill our inner hollows or spiritual selves. Each to each, no accounting for taste, eh?
But ‘mere’ things have long been the precious bits and artifacts of who we are and what we, each, truly treasure. Later in life with the passage of time, we can still have feelings holding a favorite stuffed, named companion or looking at pictures of a favorite childhood book. One of those great possibilities in life.
Yesterday, I watched what Helen Keller called “The thrill of returning consciousness” as Anne Sullivan pumped water over her hands and she suddenly connected that sensation with the word she had long spelled: w-a-t-e-r.
And there were the boys, each rediscovering the joys of their previous times playing and staying here at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s. Things, places, and live in-person hands-on experience relived deeply and profoundly.
Never discount the palpable, significant, necessary power and value of oft-taken-for-granted things and place. As well as the many connections and personal meanings that are automatically and magically generated in the thoroughly engaging, energizing process.
(…To say nothing of photographs–memories of otherwise transient, ephemeral moments of being or becoming involving things and place)