I get that. Change can feel catastrophic, even if it’s something we’ve always dreamed about. It often feels like a door slams behind us long before we’re ready to leave the building.

Sometimes I miss parts of my life so intensely that they’re almost tangible. But the past I long for is illusory. I forget that those times I miss so much often felt as uncertain and messy as the present can feel right now. Even if I could re-insert myself into the past, I’m not the same person I was back then, and I wouldn’t react to situations in the same way.

Clinging to the past is grasping at a vapor.

Much of my longing isn’t for the times themselves but for what they represent. I miss my children’s childhoods, but I don’t need to go back to actively raising them. What I really miss is the ability to protect them, nurture them, watch them absorb new experiences and knowledge. I miss the mom friends I had back in those days, watching their children grow alongside mine. When I miss practicing law, it doesn’t mean I want to dive back into the intensity of that world–it’s missing a sense of accomplishment and purpose, using my mind in a very specific way. And missing my band days? No, I don’t want to sing in a band anymore. I just miss who I was back then, the rush of being onstage, the chance to craft a song.

I appreciate the opportunity to time-travel through my memories. Distance provides insight. Revisiting the past helps me understand more than I did the first time I passed through.

Maybe this is what I’d tell my mom, who cried long after she moved into the new house she eventually came to love: change doesn’t move us forward in a straight line–it’s multidimensional. Everything we’ve experienced stays with us. When I loosen my grip on a past event itself, memory gives me new ways to understand who I was then and am now.

And this can lead to some really wonderful places.

But they take a piece away from us as well. Their passing leaves one less person in the world who remembers our personal times and spaces, who witnessed our struggles and celebrated our victories. We lose stories–it’s hard to reminisce when our partner in crime isn’t physically present to chime in with their perspective of the narrative. Inside jokes fall flat; the one who “gets it” isn’t there to laugh, and nobody else knows what we’re talking about. We’re left to safeguard precious memories on our own.

The future is impacted, too. It doesn’t look like we thought it would. We lose the ability to hash out worries and hopes with a person who was always part of the scenario. We can no longer bounce ideas and solutions off someone whose insight we valued. A main character available to us in every vision of our future … isn’t.

The person we lose takes not only a part of our shared experiences with them, but a reflection of who we were in their eyes. Nobody else saw or will see us in quite the same way. Nobody will infuse us with the same energy or recognize the same potential in us.

We’re often reminded that our loved ones will always be with us and that we will see them again. Sure, but this isn’t that essay. This is the pissed-off, bewildered essay. What we lose is irreplaceable, and attempts to soften the loss sometimes feel pat.

I do know one thing: our person is gone, but for some reason, we’re still here. We still have the opportunity to radiate the essence of who they were. Did they bring joy? Clarity? Were they generous with their emotions, appreciative of the gifts others brought to a situation? We can still fill the void in both our hearts and the world with energy sourced from this. Emanating positive power won’t bring our person back, but it will reflect the best of not only who they were, but who they believed we could be …

…which may be the reason we loved each other in the first place.

Nobody wants those things.

You’ve collected a big pile of sentimentality that exists mostly to take up space:

every report card your child ever brought home;

book reports throughout the ages;

art projects involving torn construction paper, popsicle sticks, and cotton balls.

Nope. There’s not a world where your adult kid says, “Let me haul that big pile of stuff from your house to mine.”

You will have better luck with other items:

yearbooks;

the teensy shirt worn on Baby’s trip home from the hospital;

that lock of hair from the first haircut.

But ….

refrigerator art,

school celebration photos filled with kids your child can no longer name,

birthday/holiday cards. Lots and lots of birthday/holiday cards. Like, nearly every birthday/holiday card your child ever received.

Not a chance.

The truth is, you never saved those things for your kids in the first pace. You saved them for yourself.

If you can spare about a quarter of the space this stuff currently occupies, do it. Be brave and cull through the pile. Working with the wisdom of hindsight, get rid of anything that isn’t a seminal reflection of your child’s journey (goodbye, weekly book report; hello, term paper). Indulge in a little ritual if necessary: pour a glass of wine, light a candle, and say goodbye to documenting every single moment of the childhood your kid left years ago.

But keep the basics, because you weren’t wrong:

greeting cards from loved ones present and past;

notes and letters your child wrote while growing up;

yearly school portraits reflecting change in both appearance and attitude.

Like that nice wine I hope you grant yourself, some things grow in value as they age. Even if your kids never feel a pull to revisit their own pasts, the next generation will love mementos such as

autograph books from the 1940s, signed by family and friends,

high school newspaper articles written by the 1950s teenager who aspired to be a journalist,

baby pics and posed family portraits.

I’m glad somebody saved these snapshots of my parents’ lives. They shine even more brightly because they’re not buried in an overwhelming deluge of miscellaneous stuff.

I suppose the trick is to curate rather than collect.

I respect birthdays, and I always give myself permission to spend them doing whatever I want. This year, however, pinpointing that was hard. Nothing felt worth the effort.

It took a while to realize that what I really wanted was unattainable. You can’t re-insert yourself back in time.

Despite that, I woke up on my birthday knowing that I wanted to walk.

I started from home, heading toward the town where I’d attended college. That university was the beginning of why I live where I do now. I’m not from here and never intended to stay.

Many of the buildings that existed back then are gone, but they lived again for me, superimposed against the urban revitalization that now occupies their space. I followed the route I’d once taken daily, from the house I shared with housemates I enjoyed, past the magazine-store job that brought me excellent friends (and hardly any money), down along the main street to the university.

One era merged into a slightly earlier one as my route continued past the apartment I lived in when I first arrived for school. Impressions of the university were stronger here, along with the uncertainty of living on my own for the first time. The school has expanded, filling up once-empty spaces and gobbling up many of my old haunts.

I passed through a friend’s neighborhood and remembered his exuberance and endless trove of stories. A walk like this can’t help but call up shadows of people who were once major parts each day and now exist only in memory. I wondered how their stories evolved, how the rest of their lives unfolded. I considered reaching out — that’s both the pro and the con of the internet, after all; answers are just a Google search away. But sometimes there are good reasons why people have drifted into memory, and if you wouldn’t contact them in person, maybe it’s best to leave things the way they are.

I left my college days and entered the outer orbit of places my very young children and I traveled when running errands from home in the city. My sweet girls were usually happy, ready for adventures at the grocery store or playground, lighting my world just by being in it.

I’d been right, of course. You can’t immerse yourself in memory. Recollection itself changes as layers of experience and understanding deepen our perspective of even events we thought we knew well. I think we’re supposed to do that. There’s beauty in studying the fabric of our lives and finally seeing purpose in the design.

But time is more spiral than linear, and my walk had never been about visiting the past in the first place. Re-circling my younger self in all her vital, naïve glory has its wince-worthy moments, but she also possesses attributes I could use now. I need her hope, her fierceness, her sense of possibility as the whole world opens before her. I need to re-introduce myself to her so that energies of past and present can flow together in clarity and strength for this next uncertain leg of the journey.

We’ll see how I do.

The first time I made the drive I stayed on I-84, which runs mostly alongside the Columbia River. The river has a spirit all its own, ancient and powerful. It’s a magnificent work of nature, and although its surroundings are equally beautiful, the immediacy of the river to your right can’t help but draw the most attention.

The second time I passed through, I exited I-84 soon after entering the Gorge. The road climbed upward, finally reaching what must have once been a well-used overlook before the interstate diverted much of the traffic from US Highway 30 in the mid-20th century. The spot was empty that day, a stone-walled circle overlooking a panorama of river, trees, and sloping hills. From this distance, the Columbia gained more context. The expanded view showed how it cut and flowed through the landscape, where it was going and where it had been.

The older I get, the more distance I gain from specific events in my life. I always expected that time might dim their impact, but instead it deepens it. Looking back over a growing expanse of years, I see aspects I couldn’t notice while living through the original moment. The situations themselves, whether crushing or exuberant, took up my entire view at the time. They were immediate; they required action. The choices I made in response to them determined the next steps along my road, but their influence is not confined to a frozen moment in time. With the grace of distance, I can see how past events and choices fit into the patterns of my life. I can sense what might have happened had I made a different decision, and I can better understand why I chose the way I did.

Certain memories draw me back again and again. Re-visiting the good stuff often pumps positive energy into the present and helps center me. What I haven’t figured out yet is how to deal with the regrets — times I could have done more, been better, responded in a way I might know to do now but did not understand at the time. Although it’s not helpful to carry that negative energy now, these are the memories that refuse to let me go. They surface again and again of their own free will, and I’m not adept at calming their turbulent energy into something more useful.

After my first drive through the Columbia River Gorge, I suspected I’d be back. It wasn’t finished with me; there was something more for me to learn there. I don’t feel that way, now. Whatever I was meant to grasp along that particular stretch of road has been accomplished.

I wonder how far above the river I will need to be before I understand what my most persistent memories want me to know.

The first cicada invasion I recall happened during the summer of 1987. I was clerking for a law firm, grabbing quick lunches with a law-school friend who clerked at another firm nearby. Wherever we walked, cicada exoskeletons crunched beneath our feet. For my friend, a bona fide bug-phobic, this was a dystopian nightmare come to life. We had to stop every few feet so that she could get the “Ew!” out of her system. Despite her horror, we laughed all through that unusual summer. We were both pregnant, and the double bond of law school and impending motherhood cemented our friendship. By the end of the summer, we knew that our unborn babies would be best friends, good students, happy children. Standing on the cusp of so much possibility, the idea that our babies would be in high school when Brood X next arrived seemed unreal…

…but they were. During the 2004 invasion, my friend and I were relieved that our Brood X babies were not high-school seniors. The choice for graduating seniors that year was bleak: they could either adhere to tradition and hold graduation outside (amid dive-bombing cicadas, dead-bug stink, and incessant percussive noise) or move the ceremony into the more prosaic cement-block gym. Quite a bit had changed for my friend and me since Brood X’s last visit. Our 1987-88 babies had been joined by siblings. Neither of us still practiced law. My family had moved to a different house. Our cicada-girls no longer attended the same school, which meant less daily contact for us after nearly fifteen years of practically living in each other’s homes. We still shared a life-track, though. We were moms with kids juggling hectic academic and extra-curricular schedules. The college search was waiting to pounce. We remained keepers of each other’s memories. It was fun to reminisce about where we’d been that summer seventeen years earlier and to ponder what life might look like when the cicadas next dug themselves out of the earth in 2021. Our girls would be in their early 30s (impossible!), their journeys to and through college a thing of the past. There might be careers, romantic partners, maybe even kids.

The 2021 brood finds me in the same house as the 2004 generation did, but life is inevitably different. My home is emptier, quieter. My girls moved away long ago; my 1987 baby has a baby of her own, a child also born during a cicada year. I imagine that she, too, will study her little one and wonder what this baby will be like when Brood X returns in 2038. My friend is gone. She passed away over seven years ago, taking with her not only her own memories but part of mine as well. Her cicada-baby, such a vibrant part of my life for so many years, has drifted from my orbit. I think of her even more during the cicada summers that remind me of her mom. This year, the appearance of Brood X doesn’t involve conversations that start with “Remember when …?” and end with “I wonder where the girls will be next time?” A lot happens while the cicadas sleep.

The cicadas no longer remind me of events that occur in seventeen-year intervals. They remind me instead of what has happened in-between.

This time, I’m not entertaining thoughts about what my life might be in 2038. It feels too scary, like a cosmic game of Russian Roulette. Instead I’m remembering that cicadas symbolize rebirth and transformation. They aerate the soil as they emerge, allowing air, water, and nutrients to penetrate. They enrich the earth with nitrogen as they depart, leaving a richer medium more open to growth. Memories do the same for the heart, and we don’t have to wait every seventeen years to hold them close. But just in case we get too busy to remember this, it’s nice to have a periodic reminder.