Do you remember your first trip? As I shuffled through my mum’s mess room recently, I came across the artifacts from mine. As I opened the gummed-up pages of a coveted album, I found pictures of my Australian nana’s first trip with me in Canada, documenting her visit to the mighty Rockies, with a much less mighty four-year-old me. Research suggests we only start to form our memories at the age of three or four.
As much as I wanted to recall this trip in vivid detail, the only images I could muster were the ones enclosed in those pages. A friend recently told me that post-pandemic, she would latch onto any reason not to travel with her kids. And since COVID emerged, I have also felt far less inclined to travel.
But after going through a uterine cancer diagnosis at age 32, followed by multiple rounds of IVF, I discovered that life is not measured by time, but by the memories we fashion. So this summer, 30 years after that trip with my nana, I took my son on his first ever trip, a vacation to Prince Edward Island. As soon as we landed on the misty tarmac in the night, I smelled the ocean and held back tears.
Even though our memory may be imperfect, our senses have a way of rewinding time. The scent of the ocean took me back to trying Jaffas candy along a pastel bayside strip in Australia, close to my nana’s house, where she’d cut my vegemite-smudged toast into quarters. That place smelled like my home away from home.
Remembering is flawed, but reminiscing is as real as y.