Everyday Canvas

Places and Emotional Attachments

Prompt: Have you ever visited a place that remains in your consciousness, long after you left? Was it the people? The architecture?

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I think they call it episodic memory, the memory of places associated with emotions; a memory so strong that I can feel I am still in that place and I can almost visually picture it as if the time never moved.

What a miracle it is that there are so many places and landscapes, which I am delighted to visit in my mind's eye, as I have traveled quite a bit in my life. Memories of those have little to do with architecture, but a lot with the people and landscapes; yet mostly, it has been the emotions of a past moment that glued its memory to my consciousness, as if my consciousness were a scrapbook.

Starting as early as childhood, my memories, heightened by the vivid pictures of sea and landscapes, have to do with my uncles, the places they took me, and the care and attention they gave me. My uncles were the people who tried to make up for and successfully took over the place that my father had left empty; possibly for that reason alone, my memories with them glow the brightest.

Next are the places I went, visited and revisited, in my adult life, alone or with my husband: The Alps, Matterhorn, the beaches, cities in foreign countries, a barbecue on the beach at the southern coast of France, ferryboat rides on the Bosporus, London pubs, a lakefront restaurant on Lake Erie, a Canadian Winter Scene, our first son eleven months old, running on the beach in Coco Beach leaving her tiny footprints on the sand and my husband and I singing together "Beach baby, beach baby," the oak trees on Long Island, the masts of the boats in Sausalito Harbor marinas, fishermen's nets and clambake in Cape Cod…My list is too long to write, but most memories that I recall most vividly has some emotion attached to them.

Any such memory, the stark reproduction of it as if a photograph, makes me think how fortunate I am that my mind can summon it so colorfully and still has me experience, if only fleetingly, a beautiful emotion I so wish to keep for eternity. The brilliance of these reminiscences tie me to our planet and have me think what a wonderful, fantastic place this is and how lucky we all are to be living on it.