Saturday is for getting up early and starting a kindling fire in the fire ring and pulling the Adirondack chair your daughter made in shop class up close while you read a book and drink coffee.
Saturday is for cooking Zup’s sausage and Polish Delights over said fire. Saturday morning is for finding a couple of old fishing decoys and a top water lure at a garage sale. It is for looking at the lawn and the mower but leaving them both to their own devices.
Saturday morning is sitting under the crabapple tree that has another dead branch and wondering how long this tree that has been here since everyone was so small; wondering how long it will be until all of its branches die.
Saturday is for eggs cooked fast in bacon grease with a slice of American Cheese on top thrown on a bagel with a couple of slices of polish. The melted cheese and running yolk squeeze out over your Saturday hands like a gooey yellow sauce. Halfway through you squeeze on some Sriracha.
Saturday woodsmoke smells like freedom, or smell the purr of a broken mackerel tabby patterned cat sitting on your lap. It feels like, just before the approach of noon, a blanket wrapped around your heart. It tastes like something Sunday could never imagine. If you close your eyes it feels like childhood, but the kind of childhood that is slipping away.
The feeling is similar to the rise of thankfulness for family, tradition and the simpler things in life. A good campfire. A late-night movie. The smell of cedar shavings from a fish decoy that I’m carving. A long day’s work with a list accomplished. The memory of skim ice. The first time you read your favorite book.
Tears come to my eyes easily. I love my cats. My dog is my friend. My kids are my life. I love hanging out with my wife and my family and I like my home and my stuff that’s in my home. I enjoy being here.
My parents were antique dealers and at the age of 10, I became one, so I have an affinity for old things, old ways and old days. I miss my adult children when they are not around. I love looking at their old artwork for inspiration and often when I do, or if I go into their rooms, I get that feeling.
I wish my old dog, Sebastian, was here to share the feeling, and my dad, Jim were still here, but I only have to get the feeling that they might be, and… a raven slips silently overhead to remind me of them both.
I’ll feel the made-up need to go to the hardware store for some J-B Weld or some brass cup hooks or anything dad might have used for a project. I’ll open the drawers in one of the many old boxes of his stuff that I have collected. It’s a feeling, I can’t explain it.
It’s why my wife’s wallpaper on her phone’s home screen is a picture of Sebastian when his fur is nearly all gone white. Of time that will never and can never stand still, but can never be erased.
I’m a nostalgicist. Yes, it’s a made-up word. I’m largely a made-up person. Made up of all these moments of the past. Made up just like a piece of white cedar that I’ve carved by hand into a fish decoy. Surrounded by little pieces, little shavings of the past. Each one with the history and potential to create that special feeling. Whatever it really is.
Saturday has something to do with it, though, I’m positive about that.
