I was folding laundry next to my bed when it happened. It was a towel. I don’t know how my youngest daughter uses so many towels. It was pink, yellow, and white. I’ve never quite been able to figure out the design.
The towel’s old. I don’t know where it came from and it’s been around as long as I can remember. It’s worn. One of those towels that’s been washed hundreds of times and still has the shape of a towel but doesn’t absorb as much water as it used to, and the edges were frayed.
I leaned over to toss it on the pile of towels across the bed, and for some reason, I just stopped. I held the towel between my hands, feeling the fabric. My brain, which is always a mile ahead being pulled in different directions, didn’t move. I remembered when my kids were little. Helping them take a bath, then wrapping them in the towel to keep them warm while they dried.
It’s funny how when you stop like that you can almost hear the echoes of the past. Little kids running through the house, their wet footprints following them down the hall.
I blinked a couple of times and refocused my gaze. Just like that, the moment passed, but it left an impression behind.
My aunt and I like to talk about the past. It’s becoming a favorite shared hobby. As we get older, we’re developing a keen sense of the way things used to be. There was a park not far from her childhood home where I also used to play with my siblings. 900 West back then wasn’t four lanes of heavy traffic. It was an infrequently traveled road you could cross without adult supervision or traffic lights. Nobody cared if you and your siblings wandered to the Peace Gardens for a couple hours with no phones and no adults. We were just gone and came back when we were done.
There’s a sweetness to those memories. It’s a bit of nostalgia mixed with something deeper. A reminder that the world once seemed knowable and smaller and safer.
I don’t live far from there. A long Saturday run could take me past that same park. But I wouldn’t let my kids cross 900 West today — not alone. The cars move too fast. The sidewalks are filled with people who look lost, not just in geography, but in life. Addiction has crept into the corners where we used to hide behind bushes, waiting to jump out and scare each other. I used to carry my little sister on my shoulders, certain she was safe as long as I held on tight. Now I have older kids of my own, and I can’t carry them anymore. I just have to hope that what I’ve taught them will be enough — that they’ll stay upright, steady, and safe in a world I can’t control.
It’s not the same.
Funny. That’s what the towel reminded me of.
There’s an undeniable ache that comes from realizing or remembering that something is gone—not just changed, but gone in a way that you can’t get back. We’ve all experienced tragic loss and the feelings that come with it. There are big, dramatic ways that we experience that loss, but it can show up in the most mundane ways.
The phone call I’ll never get again.
The way my mom’s handwriting looked on a note.
The absurd laughter of a friendship that’s gone.
The hum of energy that existed during a season of work, now complete.
Each of these things can pull you backward if you let them. There’s a gravity to what we’ve lost. The story our minds want to tell is sometimes one of scarcity: “You’ll never have that again.” “That was the good part.” “It’s gone now.”
And maybe it is.
But does that mean I have to mourn it forever?
Or is there a way to celebrate it instead?
I think there is. I think we get to choose how we carry the past.
Not in a delusional way where I pretend everything was better than it was. I don’t want to eulogize or sanitize. Some things were painful. Some people hurt me. I hurt some people. Some of life’s seasons have been—and are—exhausting, even when they looked beautiful from the outside.
But there’s something sacred about remembering with gratitude instead of grief.
The world my kids are growing up in seems so different than the world I grew up in. They’ll never experience a ride in the back of a pickup truck with no seatbelt or get kicked out of the house with the instruction to “be home when the streetlights turn on.” That kind of freedom was specific to a certain time and place. But that doesn’t mean they won’t have their own beautiful memories. Their own stories to one day remember.
And it certainly doesn’t mean the past was wasted just because I can’t go back to it.
I’ve started asking myself, when something old and familiar shows up:
Am I supposed to mourn this?
Or celebrate it?
There’s no one right answer, but the asking itself is helpful.
It keeps me from falling into the trap of trying to measure the past against the present, or the present against what might have been. It lets me notice what was without being swallowed by what isn’t.
I can miss the simplicity of walking barefoot across 900 West and still be present enough to walk with my kids to church on Sundays. I can hold both the ache and the gift in the same breath.
The world changes. We change. The towel gets frayed. But it still dries your face. It still works. You can fold it and pause and let it remind you that the good parts weren’t fake — and they’re not lost just because they’re over.
They’re part of the fabric now, woven in.
And that is enough.
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