“Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.” ~ Oscar Wilde
There’s a theory among people who study near-death experiences (NDEs) that your entire life flashes before your eyes in a sort of “life review” at the end of physical life. Enough people have reported something along those lines that it at least qualifies as a plausible theory.
That said, there are seasons of life that seem to hand out mini life reviews while you’re still very much alive. Holidays, big milestones, the passing of the torch to the next generation — they all have a way of yanking open doors you forgot were there. Sit through a graduation and suddenly you can hear some random snippet of conversation from your own graduation or remember some tiny moment you’d forgotten for decades.
Lately I’ve had an uncomfortable number of those clear-as-day moments — the kind where it almost feels like you’ve stepped out of the present and into some earlier timeline.
Sunday I was at my parents’ house, on my hands and knees with a vacuum hose trying to clean the carpet.
Flashback No. 1: for reasons I still can’t explain, my parents have never successfully kept the part of a vacuum with the rolling brush alive for any meaningful length of time. As a kid, I vacuumed our house for years with the hose attachment, dragging the canister behind me like some sort of domestic pack mule.
Flashback No. 2: green shag carpet.
That carpet lived in the bedroom of my childhood home, and it was also in the house where I got married and lived until after Caitlin and Ethan were born. That house — complete with the same ghastly carpet — is where my parents live now.
There was something emotionally unsettling about crawling around on that floor, remembering all the different lives I’ve lived there. The good memories and the hard ones all seemed to run together into one soggy emotional pile.
And then my phone went off with a TORNADO warning back home in Meeker, right in the middle of my vacuum-induced time travel.
Flashback No. 3: I can’t remember if we’ve had actual tornado warnings in the last 25 years, but there was one the very first time I came to Meeker in 1997 to check out the town we were thinking of moving to.
It was a summer Saturday with blue sky and fluffy clouds, but every business in town had handwritten signs taped to the doors: “Closed due to tornado warning.”
My folks are from the South and have enough tornado stories to permanently elevate your blood pressure. One of my earliest childhood memories is standing in our apartment in Indianapolis watching what I called “ice cream cones” drop down out of the clouds.
That Saturday in 1997, I piled back into the car with three kiddos in tow and one on the way and announced, “I am never coming back here for any reason.”
Lesson learned? Never say never.
I think God hears those words and takes them as a personal challenge.
