By Clyde

Oh, nostalgia, why do you linger to haunt us still?

With fond memories as your escort and myriads of images still clear in our minds. Somehow, a combination, but not to be confused with neuralgia, and close to nausea.

By definition, it’s a wistful or excessively sentimental, sometimes abnormal yearning to return or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.

Don’t you just love Mr. Webster, trying to sum it up with just the perfectly chosen words from other places in his book, but he can’t give you that warm, fuzzy feeling behind them.

Enter Ken Burns music.

Think red velvet hearts tied with bow knots of pink, a satin ribbon envelope with pressed flowers and letter, sealed with a kiss on Valentines Day.

Add a little baby’s breath and you just might swoon. Not much of that going around these days.

Originally thought to be a brain disorder in 1770, nostalgia can be historical, collective or personal.

We like the latter. Like Elsie, the Borden’s cow from our childhood, we stand around chewing a cud that we previously swallowed. It tastes sweeter the second time around, and we never get tired of bringing it up again and again. It’s not unlike grandpop’s war stories.

Who doesn’t yearn to return to a more simple time, the thrilling days of yesteryear, to ride with the Lone Ranger and Tonto? High ho, Silver, away!

Kings 20:10 says, “Nay, let the shadows return backward.” The glitter in the Kleig lights at the Capitol Theater, the blue willow plates at the Dixie Diner, the bleachers at Newman Park, the rocks at Granite Lake, tea at Ms. Chase’s boarding house, the gum under the desk at Frank B. John, the names in the windows at A.M.E. Zion, the elevator cage and attendant at the Wallace building, picnics at St. Andrews, any parade on crowded downtown streets, the parakeets and fish at W.T. Grants. Add a blue mason jar in a brown paper poke and tie it with a real string.

Not unlike sea sickness, there is not a cure for nostalgia, except maybe self-immersion.

No negativity.

Who would long for frozen winters? They need to get out more. Share the warmth.

What is it that makes some people want to visit graves in the cemetery? Once a ritual, especially at Easter, it can be hard on even the sweetest nostalgist.

“Old things are passed away, all things are made new,” states II Corinthians 5:17.

Plan your Easter pilgrimmage now.

“Alas! We are but eddies of dust, uplifted by the blast and whirled along the highway of the world a moment only, then to fall back to a common level all at the subsiding of the gust,” said poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Who could begin to experience the grief of a wartime widow or mother’s loss.

“How well I know such thoughts of joy, such dreams of bliss and fain? My heart is sad, my tears will flow until my boy is home again,” said Charlie Sawyer, of New York.

Ronnie Smith counts 40 from Rowan County who died in Vietnam.

We must allow time and space for them to grieve. Even animals have a sixth sense of loss. Ruby Stirewalt continued to pay church offerings for her son who was lost in World War II. some set a place at the table for the departed.

What period in time would you choose to return to if just for a while? What would you bring back for the future to know and then forget?

“All common things, each day’s events, that with the hour begin and end, our pleasures and our discontents are rounds by which we may ascend,” says Longfellow.

Remember the good times with Patsy.

So enjoy your own personal nostalgic moments at the end of a wistful winter’s day, hoar frost on the windows and ground ice under your feet. Just go with the Beatles — “Now, I long for yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away”

Clyde lives in Salisbury.