Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Dangerous Nostalgia?

A few leaves have fallen, and I pointlessly raked some down to the street. I am 70 years old.  What did this put me in mind of? I'm thinking you could make a lot of money off a candle scent of "burning leaves." Maybe not.  The romance just might not be there for people who didn't grow up with it.

Well, I've just said terrible things about how damaging nostalgia can be, but I don't think I'm seeing it here. Nostalgia was originally considered an illness. It was a homesickness, a "home-woe" in German, and considered often fatal. We're pretty sure there's no direct mortality connected to it now. But the intense versions were found in sailors, convicts (whether in gaol or transported), and African slaves. Well, one sees the point, there. It's been an illness for me lately as well, though I think the symptoms are subsiding.

I suppose if my leaf-burning caught on despite the restrictions on it, it might become a scandal and journalists would come nosing around doing stories about me and I would be a pariah wherever I went. OTOH I'm betting some guys would come around with good bottles of bourbon to slip me on that score, so it might even out.

The genre is "melodic death metal."

Or maybe this


 

2 comments:

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  2. Blogger Grim said...
    Many years ago now, I lived in a place that had long been rural but was being eaten up a bit at a time by the Atlanta suburbs. They would come and plow down every tree, smooth the hills, and lay in 'bag-ends' on flat paved streets with sidewalks surrounded by single-family homes.

    One year I discovered that a grocery store built to cater to these subdivisions was stocking bales of oak leaves, so they could distribute them on their now-treeless lawns.

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