Okay, it’s not really Episode 37, although I do weave nostalgia into much of what I write. Still, sometimes I cannot resist hitting the topic squarely, like today. So here it goes.

I couldn’t believe it. For twenty minutes I thought I was twelve years old again. Lying on the newly carpeted floor of my vacant parental home, now a lease property, I huddled up to the heat register as my husband worked on the upstairs bathroom.

New carpet, what is more wonderful? And with the house empty between renters, it was easy for my imagination to restore my parents’ furniture to its time-honored positions: the cherry Baldwin Acrosonic—my piano from age seven until I went to college—under the picture window; the cream brocade sofa and hand-made oak coffee table on the opposite wall, the corner hutch purchased with meticulously glued-in S&H Green Stamps; and my father’s worn recliner next to the fireplace.

Water running in the kitchen to mix an epoxy remover transformed in my mind into the sound of my mother washing potatoes for Monday-night meatloaf. A vision of my dad loomed up too. I could see him settling in his chair, donning his reading glasses to search the Roanoke Times for whatever caught his attention. Each winter evening, he would look down on me, glued to that heat register, and ask: “You gettin’ your homework done, honey?”

Usually I was. But it was easy to persuade him to set the paper down and tell me a story . . . albeit quietly, so noise from the kitchen masked the fact that I was getting off-task. Perhaps my dad’s never-ending stream of stories led me to become an easily distracted multitasker. If so, that would be a small price to pay for the riches he imparted. His stories definitely led me to become an historian.

Suddenly the thermostat clicked. The billows of warm air shut off, and I had to shake myself back to the present. Reluctantly I rose and considered what my next task should be as we ready the house for new tenants.

Cleaning the windows! Of course! Out of these windows my mother gazed for 48 years, sometimes content with her lot in life, and but more often yearning for the life of travel and excitement she so craved.

Her Depression-era youth and status as an impoverished girl within an Orthodox Jewish immigrant family meant she had absolutely no chance for education. Still, her yearnings for something better stood in stark contrast with my father’s deeply built-in contentment at every station of his life, including, according to family legend, the Depression years when his contractor dad lost the family fortune and they had to pile into their remaining car and trek to New York City in search of work. My dad was a teenager when that happened, so the whole thing struck him as an adventure.

History through my father’s eyes was a living narrative, clambering to be passed on to any ear at his feet. History, to my mother, was a shadowed room, and she took no joy in narrating it.

Not surprisingly, she was not sentimental. With few exceptions, she preferred to throw out keepsakes rather than dust or store them. My father retained many things, sorting, labeling them, and dating whatever could bear a date. Caught between these extremes, you would think I’d strike a balance. But if you have seen my filing cabinets, you know which side I gravitated towards.

Still, time does move forward, and only rarely do we get to focus profitably on the past, much less luxuriate in the kind of deep nostalgia I enjoyed during my moments by the heat register.

I will tell the kids of the family moving into my childhood home that the absolute best place to study and read in the winter is that spot on the carpet, where they can build their own dreams, fanned by a comforting, warm breeze flowing through the grate.