Yearning to Get it Back

Snow whirled outside shrouding shrubs, steps, stone walls, and cars as I snuggled in before the TV and a cozy fire. In a gentle rise and fall of white, snow smooths over life’s hurry and softens distinctions between Nature’s creations and those of man. This was the winter I’d yearned for, the kind of winter my parents recalled from their youth when Dad skated on ponds frozen for months and Mom rode her sled from her backyard through the woods and into the fields beyond. Given the turmoil of world events, I welcomed the escape of snow and a movie.

Dave had gone to bed, and I was watching “The Adam Project.” Time travel, past and future co-existing, and the deceased lending a hand are not Dave’s thing. They are absolutely mine. 

Onscreen, two versions of Adam, the protagonist, have traveled back in time in search of their father. Twelve-year-old Adam is a scrawny smart-aleck who is bullied at school. He is thrilled to meet his 40-year-old self – Ryan Reynolds - who is muscular, handsome, equipped with futuristic weapons, and still a smart aleck. Their father is a professor and inventor killed two years before– in his sons’ experience - in a car accident. Yet he is the only one who can solve the chaos of the present.

When the boys find him, he is giving a lecture, cracking jokes with his students, his hair disheveled, his sport coat rumpled. His sons are transfixed. There he is. It’s a regular day at work, and the man they have ached for is… so alive.

At that, my throat tightened as I stifled a sob, not because of the scene so much as the pang I felt in imagining the poignancy of seeing Mom and Dad or my grandmother, Byeo, once more. I could feel it; the gift of getting that chance again. To see Mom on her bed, perusing the pages of her beloved Majesty magazine. To have Dad take my hand to show me an addition to his antique toy collection. To see Byeo in her blue robe flipping silver dollar pancakes on the stove. Nothing special… just the extraordinary blessing of ordinary times. 

Years ago, I clipped out and saved a Family Circus comic by Bil Keane. The strip, in full color, depicted the father gesturing to his mother, wife, and daughter to stand closer together for a picture. The caption read something like, “I want a photo of all my girls.” Appearing as white outlines next to “his girls” were the women who’d come before… the flapper, the suffragette, the Victorian, and so on… a sustaining line of women, hand in hand, leading up to Dolly, the little girl of the family. The present can be hard, and the thought, the hope, of ancestral support is comforting. 

How long ago did that cartoon appear? Which of my journals holds it within its pages? I want to find it. There are days when I want to know that my women, the grandmothers and great-grandmothers, are near, outlined in white or in whatever form they might have on the Other Side. It will be a challenge to leaf through 51 journals on that hunt. I know I’ll bog down reading entries that inspire smiles, tears, or gratitude. It could take days to find that clipping while I relive whatever transpired in whatever year, on whatever day. I know my chest will ache with yearning for some of those times. 

And here I am now, at the dining room table in February of 2026, with a snowy woodland vista beyond the window and Dave rustling papers as he prepares our taxes. Some future day, I’ll come across this piece, and yearn, with my heart aching, to get this moment back.