December always ends up full of nostalgia posts for me. I am not normally that nostalgic, but once a year feels acceptable. Maybe twice a year, since let’s face it, I do the same thing for T’s birthday.
A’s birthday is on the twenty eighth, and the very next day is the anniversary of when we moved to England. Those two days back to back almost guarantee that I am going to get a little reflective whether I want to or not.
On one hand, it feels like we just moved. Like it was yesterday that we were packing up and flying out, starting a new life in London. On the other hand, it feels like forever ago, because today makes eight years.
It is always hard to put into words, and I am pretty sure that over the years I have repeated myself when trying to describe this feeling.
What brought it home this year was photos. Our Apple TV screensaver cycles through randomised, curated photos from our albums, and this week a lot of older ones have come up. Sometimes it is recent stuff. Sometimes it is photos from the early years here. And because we have now been here for eight years, there are a lot of those.
You can tell exactly when they were taken. The girls are tiny. Four and five years old. Sometimes they are standing in rooms that look familiar but slightly different, before we did work on the house. I can date photos just by looking at walls, floors, or furniture. It does not feel that long ago, but it clearly was, because the people in those pictures are so much smaller than the people who live here now.
That is where the nostalgia creeps in.
It has been the better part of a decade since we moved. We love where we are. We are very lucky to be here. There is no regret attached to that at all. But it is still strange to look back and realize how much time has passed, even when it feels like it slipped by quietly.
Eight years. Or, if my rough math is right, two thousand nine hundred and twenty two days.
That is a lot of life packed into what still feels, somehow, like not that long ago.