You know the situation. You have told your children or grandchildren about the house where you grew up. They have never seen it, and you haven’t seen it in thirty years. So on a vacation you take a side trip and run by the old hometown and the old house. Can’t wait to show them where you lived as a kid.
As you drive into town you begin to sense that things aren’t the same as they once were. That quaint, pristine Main Street where you shopped for Christmas gifts and met your first girlfriend for a soda in the town drug store looks a little seedy. A number of stores are boarded up; ugly siding has been slapped over the decorative brick front of the First National Bank; there are numerous nail salons and second-hand clothing stores where there once were shops selling quality shoes, men’s clothing, and where your family bought their first television. The town’s Main Street hotel was torn down years ago and there’s a big box drug store there now. Even the old High School is gone, providing a parking lot for cars of people who don’t come downtown shopping anymore. They all go to the shopping centers in the next town. Your heart sinks and your enthusiasm wanes.
But the hardest thing is driving by the old family home. It is now a multi-family home, and it hasn’t been painted in years. The apple tree in the side yard is just a stump, having been cut down a decade ago. The window of your bedroom is patched with cardboard.
You are experiencing solastalgia. The change which has taken place brings about sadness. What was once nostalgia and homesickness has now morphed into distress and melancholy. What was isn’t anymore. The stories you told about sleeping out in the back yard with your best buddy and selling lemonade from the front sidewalk seem to your kids to be inconsistent with what they are viewing. Your wife is remarkably silent…having nothing she can add to the moment to make things better.
You’d love to jump out of the car to see if your initials are still embedded in the front sidewalk from when your dad spent a hot and muggy July Saturday pouring cement to replace the broken sidewalk. Is it possible that the can you buried in the back yard with the body of your cat who was hit by a car could still be there? How could you have learned to ride a bike on this street with all the pot holes in it? How can that twenty-something dare to sit there on the steps to your old house and smoke pot in the middle of the day?
The stories will never be the same again, and they may never even exist again. Solastalgia is an incurable disease. You find yourself making a silent promise that you will probably never come back here again. It would have been better to have lived in the memory of those wonderful stories from your childhood.
Thanks to Paul McFedrie, author of Word Spy, another of my favorite blogs, for exposing me to this colorful word.
Photo Credit: St. Louis
