Early morning on Snob Hill, our small hillside enclave in St. Louis, and late summer is showing its hand. The light slants lower, shadows stretch longer, and the air carries that faint metallic tang that suggests autumn is waiting just offstage. For a few days we even believed it had arrived early. Those mornings were crisp enough to make us reach for sweaters and to wonder whether we should start clearing the hummingbird feeders.
But it was only a tease — a “false fall,” the weather forecasters call it. Now the Missouri heat has returned, the rain still refuses to come, and the gardens are looking worn down. “Peak-ed,” as Mother used to say, drawing the word out as though the plants themselves were too weary to keep their heads up. The Morning Glories, however, haven’t gotten the message. They’re still flinging themselves across trellises in a violet-blue flourish, as if late-summer gardens in St. Louis can’t be told what to do.
And it’s in moments like these — between what was and what’s next — that nostalgia creeps in. We admit it: we think of ourselves as Nostalgics. Not people who live in the past, but people who take time to turn it over, the way you might handle an heirloom teacup. The past is how we got here, wherever “here” is — even Snob Hill in Missouri.
For us, nostalgia often arrives in the cusps of seasons, those liminal edges. There’s the rush of spring planting, followed by the weary end of August when the tomatoes hang bruised and the hostas eaten down. There’s the flurry of Thanksgiving plans, followed by the carcass aftermath. There’s the glitter of Christmas (for us), followed by the gray January hours of packing it all away.
As our friends in recovery have shared with us, “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.” That strikes us as the healthiest kind of nostalgia. Not denying what came before, but carrying it, letting it shape us without dragging us under.
Nostalgia gets accused of being sentimental, even indulgent. But we think it tempers us. It teaches us to value the present, to see that today’s Morning Glories in the garden are tomorrow’s memory. Nostalgia doesn’t just pull us backward; it reminds us we’re in the middle of making new memories, which, like ornaments, will one day get packed with all the others.
So yes, we’re Nostalgics, and gladly so. Nostalgia isn’t about clinging to the past; it’s about keeping company with it. Letting it remind us who we’ve been and how we’ve arrived here on Snob Hill. And maybe it begins, more often than not, in a moment like this one: early morning light, the gardens fading, and even in their tiredness, still teaching us how to look ahead.
Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The line has been overused and, too often, misrepresented. But it serves us here. Nostalgia is the proof: the past folded into the present, as inseparable as roots and soil, seasons and light in this corner of St. Louis we call home.