PERSONAL SUBSTACK ARCHIVE: A lasagna of different me's
On time travel in the mountains
First, a correction. I wrote in this newsletter once that losing my grandparents’ apartment in Warsaw was saying goodbye to “the only home that’s been a steady anchor throughout my itinerant life.” That’s not right, there’s another. This is a formal apology to an old log cabin at the end of an unpaved road overlooking the Polish Tatra mountains, where I spent half my summers and many cozy winter nights. It means the world to me.
I haven't been to the house, which belongs to my family, in something like three or four years, and I got to go back this January with my mom. I’m tempted to use some corny metaphor about the trip turning out to be a form of time travel, teleporting me into my childhood —but I experienced something far more layered, like some sort of trippy lasagna of memories, nostalgia, grief, and delight, with each bite filled with a juicy mix of it all.
The house, whose spruce exterior has darkened with time, is filled with lives past. I don’t just mean the framed pictures of me and my cousins, various artifacts my grandfather brought back from his work travels to Central Asia, or the old skis mounted on the wall that someone in the family used in the 1950s. I’m thinking of the more mundane. When I go to pour myself coffee, I find a chipped mug with a sweet illustration of a gang of cats hanging out in a hot air balloon. It was mine as a child, and a possessiveness immediately grabs me. I am taking it back. My cousin’s baby plate – the kind with little compartments – also gets a tug of nostalgia. I'll let it be, the plastic indestructible, waiting at the house for the next generation.
When my mom and I make our beds, we pull out from the linen closet sheets softened by decades of use. I see a paisley pattern of a duvet cover from my mom's bed in our old apartment, where I’d come looking for comforting snuggles well into teenagehood. My mom points out that the green gridded set she just put on her bed was my aunt's and uncle's, and I wonder whether there's a part of her that will feel connected to her sister when she tucks in at night.
I wear my grandfather's wool slippers around the house, and put on what are (we think) his boots to go for a walk. They are too big, so I'm clomping like a little kid, but they're also perfect for the calf-height snow.
I feel an acute sense of time functioning on two parallel tracks in the house. One is time passing, the other is time preserved. The last couple of years have been filled with loss for our family. Everything is different. My aunt and my grandfather are gone. But the mountains are steadfast, and the house remains. The sheets and slippers are still there, keeping us cozy. The trees my grandparents planted at the bottom of the property’s sloped grounds used to be short little babies, barely taller than the fence. Now, they almost completely obscure the view, appearing as tall as the peaks behind them.
The beveled, wooden handles of the utensils that have been in the kitchen drawers for as long as I remember used to be a dark brown. Now they are a washed, light gray. I’m surrounded by tactile elements that are so intensely familiar. The finishing of the wood on the dining table makes it slightly sticky, no matter how clean it is. As I plop my laptop down, I remember our childhood coloring books getting stuck to the surface. My skin is tougher than it was as a 7-year-old's, but it's still no match for the unvarnished wood of the upstairs floors, which juts a splinter into my foot with a familiar sting. Like me, all that wood that surrounds the house, that forms its structure, that cozily envelops you in its interior, is older, but still the same.
Actually, the house is quite literally as old as I am. I look through my grandmother's thick, faux leather-bound album documenting the construction. There I am, a baby in a carrier on my mom's back, in a turquoise bandana (that I still own). It’s summer, and my mom, an architecture student, is surveying the site. There I am again, a slightly bigger baby in winter clothes, right in the middle of the construction site, this time with my grandmother. I post this picture on Instagram, captioning it "1990" and my best friend of twenty years messages me. "There's no way that's 1990, you're too big." That little correction moves me deeply — she knows how to assess a baby's size, she has one of her own. (Her brain does her own time-bending glitch — thinking my grandmother in the picture is actually my mom, their high foreheads and pulled back hair blending into one.)
My mom and I go ski-touring. On our way there, our car gets stuck in the snowy mud mere steps from the front door, despite my mom's heroic installation of snow chains on the little Honda's tires. At the end of the day, we're still city folk, and we're struggling to release the car from its trap. I then see someone approaching, a man wearing a liftie uniform from the nearby ski slope. "Sir, could you help us?" My mom looks over and smiles. "That's no ‘sir,’ don't you recognize him? It's M!" I’m a little stunned. I haven't seen him in at least a decade, probably more. He looks like a fully-grown adult man, his face weathered from working outside in the sun and cold. Suddenly, I'm confronted with my own full-grown adulthood, which continues to be improbable to me, despite my 33 years on this planet.
M was one of the neighbor boys we'd spend our days with every summer, roaming the surrounding woods. I've always had a distinct image in my head of the two of us separating from the group one afternoon. There's holding hands, a peck on the cheek. I'm maybe eight, which would make him nine. I wonder there, standing by the car pretending to help shovel, whether he remembers. Then I immediately second-guess myself. It's entirely possible that my mind, which has a tendency to spin sappy romantic scenarios, manufactured that memory from a childhood crush.
I tell that story to my bestie, the one with the baby, who comes to visit several days later. We do our own time traveling together, when along with a third school friend we go cross-country skiing, our ineptness making us cry with laughter. None of us can believe that there was a time when we competed in this sport, racing with other teens at annual inter-school “Olympics.” We feel hilariously old. We sit by the fire, trying to remember who came on which drunken college trip to the mountains, who stayed in the house.
It feels pertinent to be writing this essay several weeks after my trip. Those couple of days are already slipping from the part of my memory that feels tangible and continuous. They’re becoming snippets, images. But as I’m trying to assemble them into some sort of cohesive narrative, I realize that my experience in the house went beyond simple pangs of grief and nostalgia. Please forgive if this is all trite and obvious, I've never gotten past a high school reading of Proust's madeleine excerpt and, fittingly, I have only the vaguest memory of what that was all about. I often have this clichéd feeling that anything beyond, let’s say, 3-5 years ago, happened to a different person, in a different life. And all the different periods are separate people — there's kid me, teenage me, college me. There are even several different me’s in my twenties. I guess now, there’s also a me when my family was still intact. In the house, all these different me's reunited, warping my sense of time.
Recent favorites
Nonfiction book: Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It by Kaitlyn Tiffany. Yes, this is about One Direction, but it really isn’t. Fascinating. Terrifying.
Fiction book: The Round House by Louise Erdrich. I can’t believe it took me so long to read her. Riveting. Devastating.
Audiobook: The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown. For the media nerds and for the gossip fiends.
Podcasts: Articles of Interest - American Ivy by Avery Trufelman. All I want to wear is 1920s college dandy fashions.
TV show: Southern Charm. Wow. It’s Southern Gothic! It’s watching the lives of depraved “gentlemen” of leisure! It’s trash! It’s glorious!
Documentary: Fire of Love. I’m just hopping on the bandwagon at this point but this Wes-Anderson-y portrait of a French volcanologist couple is gorgeous.