Nostalgia

A 24-year-old feeling nostalgic is, at best, pretentious. But it can't be helped when one goes back to a childhood place- in my case my mother's hometown, a small town built around a church in the countryside, deep in the state of Sao Paulo, a five hour drive from the city- a place where I spent all my holidays growing up. I just got back from spending five days there and, as expected, memories sat waiting for me to find them at every corner.

The first memory greeted me at the front steps into the house my grandfather lived and died in- the house we now stay in when we go back there.

A delicious memory: I'm ten or eleven years old, sitting on those steps with my little cousin, eating my favorite fruit: a peach, so ripe its juices stream down my arm, its insides matching the sunset that surrounds us. Children don't usually appreciate sunsets- in fact that time of day is associated with the end of fun and the nearing of a dreaded time: bedtime. But on this day I am happy to see the sun go down because it is unusually hot. And as we sit there doing nothing but eating our fruits and waiting for the air to cool down, I say something that I couldn't possibly have understood at the time, I either heard it on television or- and this is my preferred explanation- my older self interfered with my childhood and spoke these wise old words simply because they were absolutely true: "This is the happiest day of my life."

I recall nothing before this moment on that day or after- I don't know what we did earlier or what we ate for dinner- my memory has kept only these few minutes in which I experienced the perfection of life without knowing it.

Re-living this memory now, it is still a mystery to me how I, at such a young age, was able to appreciate the simplicity of a childhood summer in the country, and I still question if I had any idea what I was talking about. But the memory sat there on those steps waiting for me all these years, knowing I would find it when I needed it. And I did need it, I need it always- that child's wisdom and the perfect sweetness of a time that so often feels like a lifetime ago, but is actually always available to me, with its lessons and its truth, whenever I need it.