Fuzzy Times

No reason for the featured image – other than it reminds me of sun, during yet another grey cloudy drippy day here in the Northeast.

They don’t tell you when you are young, that when you get older you will have trouble remembering all the little details of your life. It’s one of the things that older me realizes, but younger me never had an appreciation for – that I wouldn’t always be able to easily just go and retrieve memories of childhood, or teenage years, or even young adulthood, when it got to be later in life.

They don’t tell you that when you get past-middle-aged, that you won’t remember those conversations you had with your partner that changed your life, or you won’t remember the cute things your children said to you when they were tiny, or places that you saw or the spaces that you inhabited. It all gets incredibly fuzzy.

I lived in a house in my twenties for seven years, as an adult, and I can’t remember what the bedroom looked like, at all. I slept there, with my wife, for seven years and I have no idea. About the only thing I can remember of that house is the downstairs bathroom (which I cut a hole in the wall of with a chainsaw, to put in a larger window) and the cabinets I built in the living room where our stereo and books and childrens toys went. It seems obvious why I remember those two things – but I can drive by that house now, and look at it from the outside, and I can’t remember any of the events that happened there.

It was the first house we bought, less than a year after we were married. It was where we brought our first baby home. And our second baby, and probably our third – but I can’t remember actually, if that was in that house, or the larger one we moved to during that time (when we had three small children and a two-bedroom house was not cutting it anymore).

That second house was an upgrade in size and place – bigger house, bigger yard, room for a swingset, woods in the back. I have more memories of that house, but still not much – we lived there another seven years. I remember when I cut down one of the huge dead trees in the back and the lady from next door (who was on the town Shade Tree Commission) came running out telling me I couldn’t do that without the towns permission. I told her it was already dead, and coming down one way or another – I was just choosing the way.

That house, I can remember the bedroom, and what the kitchen looked like, and the wallpaper we put up. I remember the knee wall that separated the kitchen and living room, making a large space (this was when “open concept” was still a pretty new thing). I remember the chair in the corner that my wife used to sit in to read the children stories – but mostly, I think I remember that because she has told me that that was her favorite part of that house.

There was a huge basement, which 14-foot ceilings – unfinished – because the house was built on the side of a hill and the builder had to make the foundation extra tall. We always wanted to do something spectacular with that basement, but we never did.

Our babies grew into big kids and pre-teens in that house, and again – I don’t remember any of that except small flashes. They never tell you when you are spending all that time with your kids, when you are pouring your heart and soul into every ounce of growing that they do – that you won’t remember 99.9% of what happened then, when you get older.

There were bad times, as with any children – and it seems that those are the .1% that are burned in my brain. I know there were good times – I know there were smiles and laughs and jokes and stories and rolling around on the floor and falling down and tears of joy. But I don’t remember any of it.

I wonder sometimes if this is just me, but when I ask friends and family who share my age bracket, their experiences seem to be the same.

There is so much that happens in our lives, it flows around and through us like a river every day, carrying a vast flood of sights, sounds, and experiences – we should know better when we are young to do everything we can to grab onto those and hold them. We should be inhaling those moments, bringing every one deep into our being, so they cannot be forgotten. But we don’t, and they are.

They don’t tell you that when you’re young, but they should.