- Elicit
I seem to experience intense feelings of nostalgia rather frequently in my everyday life. It’s brought on by the simplest or mundane of things, like the way the sun hits the top of conifers in the morning or evening, the trilling of a bird in the distance during certain seasons or weather conditions, the way a wall clock ticks away steadily in the stillness of my home (especially when accompanied by motes of dust in the sunlight), or the smell of a running air conditioner.
These moments illicit elicit both mysterious and beautiful emotions, but are hurled at me constantly. While I enjoy the feelings they give me, I seem to experience them far more often than I think most would consider normal. I don’t know if there is a term for this sense of hyper-nostalgia, or what (if anything) it’s indicative of. Most of it is tied to insignificant moments from my childhood, like lying in the melting snow on a Spring day (the trilling bird), or sitting bored in the car waiting on my mother (the sun on conifers), but a lot of it is more ambiguous.
So I thought it would be fun to ask other people what their strongest (and perhaps recurring) moments of nostalgia are triggered and/or tied to. What are some of yours?
As a kid, we visited my grandmother often and she always had vanilla ice cream for us, and she played classical music on the piano. Now every time I eat vanilla ice cream or hear any of the pieces she played, I am reminded of our visits to her home. She had an old apartment, and all the furniture was at least 100 years old other than the baby grand Yamaha piano.