From My Desk

12-31-25

By Lauren Royce, Editor
While I was home for Christmas with my family, I did a lot of reflecting on the past year and did an even greater amount of wallowing in childhood nostalgia. My high school self and my sister’s recent graduation photos decorate the house walls. My room is a capsule of five years ago when like many during the pandemic, I decided to DIY a makeover of my space. I’m still happy with the shades of bluish purple I chose, thankfully. Baby books and old art projects sit frozen as if my teenage self is to return but instead, adult me invades. It’s like a haunted house, or maybe a museum, of past selves.
But the very best nostalgia-wallowing could be done in front of the family computer, an archaic benevolent beast by today’s standards of technology. On it, my mother has saved and documented the first nine months of 2007. In them, I am 5-almost-6 years old and my sister is born in the late spring. Our animals are all alive and no one has died yet. I was not prepared for how plump and youthful our horses looked in mom’s photos, brown coats shining. One died ten years ago, the other we sold to a neighbor. Our white and tabby colored cat, Marble, is half the size of me. I sucked in air seeing how I was holding him like a ragdoll, but he was a very well-tempered cat. He lived three more years until the Monday in third grade when we had to say goodbye.
My poor sister had complained to mom there were less photos of her as a baby than there were of me (technically, she is right). But a huge cache of them is right on that computer where seemingly every minute of my sister’s infancy is clear as day in digital form. Her round and chubby self, dressed in sweet baby frocks, and lanky me in tie-dye and flip flops. Because I am a distinguished elder member of Generation Z, all of mine are physical and some are specifically on Polaroids.
I flipped through every photo and saw 2007 through my mom’s eyes: hummingbird feeders, me and our dog Cody, a wagon of hay bales, my cousin teaching me to float in my uncle’s pool. Mom’s parents, both gone, holding my sister. It was like a reunion of sorts, and an odd Christmas gift to myself. As the new year is upon us I think there is no shame looking back sometimes because it reminds me of the beauty of continuing forward. We still have cats, a dog and chickens. I stopped wearing glasses and my sister, still little, is in college. There is no going back but there is always room for remembering. I will resolve to do so while making room for new memories in the year to come. Happy New Year, all!