I saw this photo in my Facebook feed from a group that posts old newspaper articles from Blackstone, Massachusetts, where I grew up.
It knocked me off my feet with nostalgia.
The school in the background is my elementary school, which still stands today. Those doors led to the kindergarten classrooms. When I was a little boy, I looked at that brick wall with the school’s name—John F. Kennedy Elementary—for what seemed like forever, because at the time, it was.
By the time I left that school in third grade, I had spent more than half my life there.
It looks just like I remember it
In the foreground is a woman on a horse, which only added to the nostalgia. Until my parents were divorced when I was seven or eight years old, I grew up on a horse farm with a father who was a cowboy in every sense:
We owned horses. Boarded horses. Trained horses. My father also shod horses and owned a mobile blacksmith trailer that he drove around town.
That photo — my school and a woman on horseback — was my childhood encapsulated until divorce upended it. Those two images, grainy and black-and-white, feel like my childhood. They were me until circumstances beyond my control didn’t allow them to be me anymore.
Nostalgia is defined as “a bittersweet feeling of happiness and slight sadness caused by remembering something from the past.”
Has there ever been a more accurate definition in the world?
