Nostalgic Ache.

The purr of the lawn mower’s engine stretched all the way across my neighborhood and provided background noise to another summer day taking place. My house was close enough to the neighborhood pool that I could hear the distant sounds of children yelling and the rhythmic cadence of the diving board. It reminded me of a heartbeat that ended in a splash. The young lifeguards twirled their whistles and blew into them loudly now and again, inspiring nostalgia around the area in those who were once young, and sun-soaked, and sticky from melted popsicles that dripped down their hands.

I stood in the kitchen and looked out the front window of our home at our front yard. It was a modest patch of green grass about fifteen feet wide by twenty feet long that stretched out like a big fat green tongue. It led towards a waist-high collection of suburban bushes and a gigantic tree that reached high above our yard. We were the end unit of a strip of townhouses; a degree or two more impressive than the rest because we had a side area. But essentially the homes were all clones that used minor differences to appear unique; green shutters, a yellow door, a birdbath.

My father was cutting the grass and I could tell by the residue of soda on the counter and the mostly empty bottle of Jack Daniels beside it that he was probably drinking. I didn’t need to look outside to know what he was wearing. Probably just a cheap old pair of swimming trunks that looked like they were made in the 1980s and nothing else. The old man only wore shirts and shoes when it was a life or death situation, and even then it wasn’t a guarantee. He was maybe an inch taller than me, stocky and robust. Once upon a time, according to legend (and old dusty polaroids), my father was lean and athletic. He worked in a steel mill during his younger days, hauling heavy pillars of metal around. “No place could be so hot and so cold all at once“, he often said. The afternoons were like African summers. The molten, melted steel covered men in dripping sweat, leaving them black and sooty, panting in sauna air. Then at night, when the sun went down, it transformed into Alaskan winter. Steel would draw the cold from the starry sky like magnets and men would go about their taxing labor with foggy breaths and extra layers of clothes. All taking place in a small rural town in Ohio. It was always hard for me to picture that younger version of my father. Thin, optimistic, handsome. He felt like a stranger to me.

He still maintains some of those traits today, just aged versions of them. And as I age too, I get it. But the only real opinions I could draw from my father were based on my life experiences with him. I had pictures of family and friends thumb-tacked to the wall by my bed. They were usually the first thing I saw in the morning. There were a few pictures of me with friends, but old black and white polaroids took up most of the space. History always intrigued me. Not only the subject itself – but the passage of time. For example; there was a picture of my mother, young and beautiful, squatting behind a three-foot-tall child version of myself, feeding bread to ducks by the lake where we used to live. And another young photo of my uncle Ray (who passed away a few years back), looking cool as hell at one of our family picnics, drinking a can of beer with a burning cigarette in his other hand. A collage of people I love; all younger versions of the ones I knew now. Frozen frames of trivial points in their life, yet now those moments feel so important. It always gave me such a strange feeling.

Looking at them always inspired me to savor the simple things in life. I don’t think many moments can be properly cherished until you have the time and hindsight to look back on them, which I find sad. Maybe that strange feeling is a form of longing for what the images represent – places you can see but never touch again.

This summer reminded me of all the ones before it. The aroma of sun-tan lotion, old bay seasoning, burning cigarettes. The sounds of beer cans being cracked, of old rusty fold-out beach chairs that should have been thrown out years ago. A pile of steaming blue crabs on the table. The sun rubbed our backs and turned our skin dark and golden because we earned it – we turned enjoying summer into an art. No amount of heat or bugs could keep us from sitting outside long enough to enjoy the transition of summer day to summer night; when the crickets started to join in on our conversations and the lightning bugs silently looked for love, glowing bright just to fade away a second later, like flashing photographs… like the lives we live…

Like… the sensation I get at the start of every summer, and all the summers to come, until I’m made up of old pictures and memories…

… That nostalgic ache.