Nostalgia

It’s odd sometimes, how a chance comment can bring it all back to you…

Our friend Meli called this week, and a chance comment by Richard about horse-drawn school buses drew a hoot of laughter from her. ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ she said. ‘There’s no such thing!’ she said.

I beg to differ. At my first teaching job, the school was in an isolated community in northern Alberta, and to provide as many jobs as possible, they had a system of picking up the kids in horse-drawn wagons, which were converted to sleighs in the winter, and bringing them to school. In order to prove this, I dug out my photos this morning, scanned them in, and uploaded them to Flickr for all to see.

But weird things happen when you open old photo albums – old boyfriends, forgotten colleagues, missed pets, long-ago parties and out-of-date hairstyles all come tumbling out. And sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s best forgotten – much of it is bittersweet. There were a few tears amongst the laughter this morning, and a couple of searches on Facebook that turned up nothing, but mostly, few regrets – if I had to do it again, I’d choose to do it all over.

And that’s a good thing.