I’ve been drowning in nostalgia all week. It all started with a jar of Vicks Vaporub. I was steamrolled out of my chaotic routine by a nasty case of bronchitis, which morphed into an even nastier case of pneumonia. I was sick. The kind of sick where you have to force yourself out of bed just to brush your teeth because you realize it’s been two days. After a visit to the doctor almost a week in, I scrounged around and found the (outdated) jar of Vicks Vaporub ointment that most everyone has tucked away somewhere in their house. That classic blue jar, with the seafoam green lid that imprisons the pungent menthol eucalyptus that is sure to clear one’s sinuses, and suppress a cough when rubbed on the chest or the bottoms of the feet. It was the smell of the Vaporub that heaved me into the depths of decades old memories.

I was always sick as a kid. Our family physician dubbed me “Pitiful Pearl”. I can still taste the antiseptic that lingered on the part of the glass thermometer where my lips lay just beyond the thin plastic sheath. Going to the doctor caused me great anxiety as a child, perhaps it was just because I was an anxious kid (who is now a somewhat anxious adult with a wicked case of White Coat Syndrome), or perhaps it was because I was always at the doctor and usually sick enough to need a shot. I was terrified of needles. I once kicked a nurse named Betty for trying to give me a shot. I kicked her so hard in fact she had to straighten the stiffly starched white cap that sat atop her near-perfectly coiffed blonde hair. At some point the office staff had started spelling the word shot- it hadn’t taken me long to figure it out what s-h-o-t meant. Eventually the nurse began to use the word “injection”, and then she would give a nod and a wink to my mom. That method of trickery didn’t last long either.

Anyway…nostalgia. The Vicks reminded me of the way my mom would whisper to my dad once she thought that I was asleep, seeking reassurance that I was going to be okay. I was a fragile kid, who rarely caught just a cold. I would get pneumonia at least every other year, I can’t count how many times I had strep throat, and in the second grade I came down with mono- “the kissing disease”- that left me quite perplexed as I had never been “kissed”. I was 8. It sucked. I missed weeks and weeks of school. I remember that after days of running a wildly high temperature, my parents found a doctor who would see me on the weekend. I still recollect the bile toned fog that hung heavy in the dank little office, a chipped ashtray occupied one little corner of his desk, and it had been days since he had razored the salt and peppery stubble from his face. He wore one of the big, metal spheres on his forehead; his was rimmed with rust that matched the Burnt Sienna crayon in my jumbo box of Crayolas.

I remember vomiting on the crushed velvet footstool (these are now called ottomans) in our living room when we got home, it tasted like strawberry Bubbalicious bubble gum. I can still tell you how fruity and refreshing the Hawaiian punch tasted after my fever finally broke and it was the only thing that sounded good to me. Those were the days when parents pumped their children full of red dye number 5 and never gave it a second thought. I recall the smell of our house, and my bedroom, the way the rain smelled when I had my bedroom window open in the middle of the night, and the way the pages of the books smelled that I would read and reread, while other kids played outside.

Back to present day. My first outing last week (which proved to be quite premature) was to make an appearance at the wedding of a daughter of a dear friend. I sucked it up, showered, and coughed obnoxiously through the entire ceremony. We decided since we were in the small Midwestern town where my grandparents had lived, died, and been buried, the same little town where I walked to the candy store on Sunday afternoons with my cousins to get the little jellied fruit slices, and the same little town that my dad hitchhiked to upon his unexpected return from Vietnam, that we would go up to the quaint cemetery up on the hill, just at the edge of town and visit where my grandparents had been laid to rest, my grandmother some 30 years ago, and my grandfather followed her, 14 years later.

The weather was beautiful, one of those unexpected 75 degrees days of Indian summer, when you know that it’s only a mirage and winter can’t be far behind. The fall color wasn’t as bright as it has been in some years, but it was enough with dehydrated golds, crimsons, and burnt oranges dancing their way to the ground on the coattails of a formidable October breeze. I found the headstone that marked the earth where my grandparents had been laid side by side. I felt that familiar twinge of heavy-heartedness, but it’s been many years now since they’ve been gone, but the nostalgia, and the desire to “go back home again”, or in this case back to my grandparents, was nearly overwhelming. I could suddenly smell the Brut on my grandpa’s freshly shaven face, tan from hours in the sun, working in the garden that he adored. I could hear the theme music from The Wonderful World of Disney which was on every Sunday evening, and I would beg my mom to stay until the show was over. I could smell the fried chicken, and taste that first bite, and feel the traces of the lard at the corners of my mouth. I could hear Jim Reeves singing Christmas carols, the tunes pouring from the console stereo unit on the plush carpeting where I would lay every Christmas while the cousins played with their new toys and devoured the treats from their stockings.

I lay on the floor in front of the stereo, listening to Jim Reeves sing “The Little Drummer Boy” and occasionally I would doze and wake to Elvis’ “Blue Christmas”, with the smell of the fresh fir tree that stood in the corner wafting in the air. I can smell the bitterness of the instant coffee my grandfather drank from a mug and bowl at the head of the table and can still see his pack of Winstons lying there, waiting to come to life once flint turned to flame. I can hear my grandma asking for the third time if it’s her turn during a game of Yahtzee. Nostalgia overwhelmed me as I walked the hills of that cemetery for almost an hour, struggling to leave. I hadn’t been to “visit them” for far too long and suddenly I felt too guilty to leave. Suddenly I remembered the Easter Sunday when I, as an angsty teenager, had wielded hateful words to my grandma, not having any idea that they would be the last words. Then it is 14 years, and 8 months later, I can see my grandpa, in his hospital bed in the living room of the house that he built, with that same plush carpet, and the dish of candy that rested next to his chair. His last words to me were pleading, and full of love, in fact he made me promise that I would do more with my life, for myself, for my children, because I was worthy of more than what I had chosen for myself to that point, I was worthy of better. I kept that promise. We laid him to rest 6 days later in the bitter cold just days after Christmas…nostalgia.

Why do we do this? Why do we spend the first decade, almost two, wanting time to go faster, we want to be adults, we don’t want to have to tag along on Sundays to our grandparents house, we want our own place where we call the shots, and our parents are off of our backs. I did it, and I have watched my own children do it. I have given them the same speech my mother gave to me. Don’t rush it. You have the rest of your life to work, pay bills, and do whatever you want. But then something happens. And suddenly we want to go back, back to those Sunday afternoons when we are all gathered at the table together, back to have one more Christmas with carols swirling through the air, stockings hung by the faux red brick fireplace, one more Easter Sunday to take back your hateful words which still ricochet around the walls of your mind some 30 years later, to be sick, and have nothing to worry about because mom will make the doctor’s appointment, and drive you, and dad will carry you to the car if you’re too pitiful to walk, and mom will rub the Vick’s on your chest. We want to go back to the time and place we were once so insistent on escaping.

Is nostalgia healthy? Perhaps in small doses, but here in my middle age, I feel like I am trapped in the quicksand of the past, the warmth and romanticism of days gone by have overwhelmed me. I long to not only go back to the days of my youth, but also for my children to be young again, and all at home under one roof.

As we walked our last lap around the cemetery, I picked a pine cone up from the ground. It’s something I do when I visit someplace that I want to remember, when the place is special enough to me that I need to take part of it with me. I have a basket with pine cones that sits on the hearth of our fireplace. There are pine cones from Georgia that I collected when my oldest son graduated from his infantry training, and when I first looked at him and a man stood in the place of a boy, a man who said “Sir” and “Ma’am” and was willing to die for his country. I later collected pine cones from North Carolina where my daughters lived, one in the military and one not. I couldn’t bring them home with me, so I carried home pine cones. I have pine cones from Kansas, where my son and his family now live, and one from the base where he returned from Afghanistan, and today I added a pine cone from a little town in the Midwest because I couldn’t bring my grandparents home with me, and I couldn’t go back, so today, another pine cone. Another reminder that life is fluid and we can never go back. A reminder to savor every moment…