Rosslyn Redux

Tag: Nostalgia

  • Perspective vs. Nostalgia

    Perspective vs. Nostalgia

    Barns, March 2023 (Photo: Geo Davis)
    Barns, March 2023 (Photo: Geo Davis)

    I am not quite sure where I belong but I have always been engaged with where I am. I like to think this gives me both a resistance to nostalgia and a breadth of perspective but I could be wrong. — Edward Relph (Source: Placeness.com)

    Much thinking these end-of-February, beginning-of-March days on seasonality and sense of belonging, on perspective — especially evolving perspectives — and nostalgia, sentimentality, wistful-if-illusory longing.

    This icehouse rehab, moving closer and closer to the vision that has beckoned for years, and the snowfall after snowfall after snowfall, such welcome gifts after a fairly light winter. These absorbing present tense plots are playing out against almost eighteen years of Rosslyn custodianship.

    Twin Tracks & Tranquility, March 2023 (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)
    Twin Tracks & Tranquility, March 2023 (Photo: Susan Bacot-Davis)

    Cross-country outings transporting me deep into memories that Susan and I made during our first winters together more than two decades ago. And deeper still, recollections of skiing as a child in the mid 1970s, with my younger brother and sister, with my mother.

    I’m learning something about perspective and nostalgia. Something still coalescing.

  • The Farm

    Rock Harbor Rhubarb (and memories of The Farm!)
    Rock Harbor Rhubarb (and memories of The Farm!)

    We walked down the road from the tennis court and stopped off at my parents’ house, still closed up for the winter. It would be several weeks before my parents arrived in Rock Harbor for the summer, and by then the asparagus would have gone to seed, so we picked enough for dinner and enough extra to bring back to the city for another meal.

    I also picked a fistful of rhubarb to sauté with maple syrup for dessert. Susan disliked rhubarb, but I loved the lip puckering tartness. The taste transports me instantly to The Farm.

    My parents, living and working in New York City, had purchased an 1840s farmhouse on 85 acres near Greenwich, New York five months after getting married. I was born less than two years later.

    Although The Farm served primarily as a weekend getaway for the next five years, it dominates the geography of my earliest childhood. A stream of nostalgia gilded memories flow from this pastoral source: exploring the time-worn barns, absent livestock except for those conjured up by my energetic imagination and the swallows which darted in and out, building nests in the rafters, gliding like darts through dusty sunbeams; vegetable gardening with my mother; tending apple, pear and quince trees with my father; eating fresh rhubarb, strawberries and blackberries; discovering deer and raccoons and snakes and even a snapping turtle.