A reflection by Jenna Griffin
“I don’t always remember to write about my homes because when you live there, everything feels normal in a sense, unremarkable. But when I do go back and find certain writings from the spaces I have called home, I am thankful for the details that I have already forgotten. I’m thankful for that strange sort of nostalgia that sits in my stomach when I read about my past lives, the sounds and smells that were mundane for a time, but that are now precious to me, and so far away.”
—From a piece I wrote for the post calvin, April 2019
Full piece here: https://thepostcalvin.com/this-home/
Two years ago, I sat in my apartment kitchen and I looked around at all the little things that made up the backdrop of my life in Romania. I was fully in love with my life. I tried to imagine and document the details that I would, at some future point in my life, look back on with fondness, and, yes, nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a difficult emotion to pin down. It is a vague and flighty feeling in and of itself, and yet it is always, in my experience, activated by something very, very specific. It lurks in the details—the more obscure the better. The peculiar laminated smell of an elementary school classroom. The squish of wet grass under bare feet. The taste of pool water as it stings the back of your throat.
I was surprised, but pleased in a way, to read that one of the definitions of nostalgia is homesickness. Yes, I thought, because the most intense feelings of nostalgia for me are always tied to a specific place, and generally that place is wherever I was living at the time. The slant of morning light in the bathroom of a little French flat. The feel of cool, wet wind coming in through the balcony door in my Romanian bedroom, making the whole apartment feel open and wild. One specific memory can open a portal to the place I called home, and to the person I was in it.
Today, I read the words that I wrote two years ago, and I think: maybe nostalgia is just the widening gap between what we knew then, and what we know now, and the knowledge that we can’t go back. What is nostalgia, other than looking at some part of your life from an ever-widening distance? The days that stretch between these versions of us quiver like the strings of some great instrument, and the same song can sound different on different days, depending on what you know of the world.
I did not know, when I wrote this little ode to my beloved Romanian home, that not even a year later I would be forced to leave it. I did not know that another year would pass and I would still be waiting, waiting, waiting for my chance to get back. I did not know that my roots would start growing into this New Mexico soil despite my best intentions to keep them curled tight against me.
What will I remember about this place, I wonder? The heady, warm scent of juniper burning in the fireplace. The whir of my old sewing machine. The dry wind and the copper-colored dust settling perpetually on my windowsills, my dresser tops, the exposed edges of my books.
There are already pockets of nostalgia here, given space to form by the changing of the seasons and the slow turn of months. There was a season of moths, where hundreds of them beat against the windows and dozens slipped in through open doors. Every night I would catch what I could with a glass jar and an old envelope, shaking them back out into the night. One day, we realized they were gone. This happened too with the rains. The monsoon season came and then vanished, leaving a wet pool of nostalgia somewhere beneath my rib cage, the smeared memory of driving rain on dirt, and of water slicking over the bright faces of the wildflowers.
It’s funny, in a sad sort of way. As much as I never wanted to call this place home, and as painful as some of these months have been, I know that the day will come when I will look back on my time here with that strange sort of longing, that elusive homesickness that says: yes, you were here. Yes, this was your life. Yes, this is still a part of you. And who could have known?
Jenna Griffin is a writer and community development worker based in the Jiu Valley, Romania. When she is not writing or working with the youth at Fara Limite, she enjoys making art, foraging in the mountains, studying foreign languages, and rock climbing.