I can’t get away from the past, yellow Formica countertops, tobacco-stain brown pine cabinets, cooktops in harvest gold, burners coiled like snakes. I walk the spongy carpet to the louvered doors, breathe in the cool, mildewed conditioned air. This synthetic world of cigarette smoke and formaldehyde made me. I am sawdust and Coffee Mate, vinyl and Butterick’s sewing patterns.
Forty years on, on the opposite coast with its own arid form of nostalgia (Eichler and Eichler-adjacent, plywood walls, all right angles and walls of glass, the occasional built-in interrupting the room), I tap through real estate ads from my Mid-Atlantic homeland. It is as familiar as ice cream scooped out of a cup with a wooden spoon. There are green expanses of lawn, muddy riverbanks, Colonial brick center hallway wallpapered wonderlands. Rooms are sparse with overstuffed easy chairs that sink into wall-to-wall, buck’s heads unblinking over boxy brick fireplaces.
I knew this place once. I came from it, a thistle emerging from rows of seed corn. And then I moved to the Bay Area, a land of rugged beauty. I made my own drama. I ached for something else and then settled into what was. But nothing is as fertile as that starting place. The key to creativity lies in nostalgia.