Nostalgia, a term first used by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688, describes the sometimes life-threatening clinical symptoms of homesickness. Nostos — homecoming; algia — pain.
Physicians have been describing these mysterious symptoms of lethargy and malaise for as long as soldiers, sailors, refugees and explorers have been leaving home.
Swiss mercenaries, Captain Cook’s crew and soldiers in the trenches all suffered from this longing for what they had left behind. Considered a weakness in character, it eventually gained medical standing.
I recently had a taste of nostalgia when I went away for a month to finish a couple of writing assignments. I thought if I were to go away to a place on a shore, somewhere new to me, with only the little dogs for company, I would happily spend my days taking long walks and reading books I had meant to read and then fill my evenings with writing. Some of that held true, but there was a feeling of melancholy I had not felt before, which took a while to recognize as homesickness.
I had neglected to value the inspiration and comfort that comes from the familiarity of my own home — visits with the grandkids, running out to the street to talk with neighbors walking their dogs, or just knowing I have friends nearby.
Not to dismiss the intense beauty of Cape Cod, where the water seems to sparkle. Twice a day, tides rush in, then pull out, and this is no gentle scouring. The dogs and I took long twice-daily walks along the beach or the salt marsh, followed by natural history readings and tick-pulling. I rediscovered Rachel Carson, a marine biologist and wonderful writer; I delighted in the beach walks and poems of Mary Oliver; and I read Scott Shumway’s The Atlantic Seashore to try to understand what I had seen.
I learned to seek out strangers when I needed conversation, to crack open oysters and fry them for dinner, to admire the ruddy-cheeked oyster farmers tending their beds every low tide. I learned to name the shorebirds and seabirds. I became amazed at mud fiddler crabs, the males sporting one huge claw, good only for attracting a female into his tunnel, always scurrying in and out just ahead, eating diatoms from the mud. I gained new respect and fear of waves, frighteningly violent and never predictable. They seemed to say, “I could take you and your kind out of here in a moment.” A look shoreward at the cliffs of glacial till eroding, the houses atop falling, showed them to be correct.
I did finish my writing projects, yet there was a gnawing in my gut that would not go away, so, we went home. Pulling into the driveway in Strafford, the little brown dogs (the LBDs) jumped out of the car and howled. I wanted to howl too, I was so happy to see our cozy home, our now green fields, our meandering sparkling Ompompanoosuc River. We set out on our usual walk in the horse fields and the wet seepy woods and dry upland forests.
I had missed the slow awakening, but it happened anyway. Trilliums, ramps, false hellebore, hepatica, spring beauties, trout lily, bloodroot, all pushing upward from the newly thawed dirt.
A groundhog, who had enjoyed a month of nibbling our yard without molestation, was suddenly assaulted by the dogs, pulled by one at each end, until I called them off and scolded them, as they do, and I do, every spring. She survives this affront and births pups every year.
I felt cured. Sometimes, those who return home find their world has changed — what they remembered is gone. Douwe Draaisma, in his book The Nostalgia Factory, speaks of homesick emigrants after the second World War, returning to find that their world had changed. Time, he says, makes emigrants of us all. Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht uses a term for homesickness that occurs when environmental devastation changes our world — solastalgia. The pain of solastalgia comes from staying put and watching your world become unrecognizable by climate change, war, mining, deforestation or other corporate assaults.
My small dose of homesickness made me more aware of the pain of war refugees. Every photo I now see of mothers and children packed up and trying to leave Ukraine has an emotional kick.
They have a painful choice: flee, and suffer nostalgia, or stay, and suffer solastalgia and possible death.
Micki Colbeck, of Strafford, is an artist, a conservation biologist and a member of the Strafford Conservation Commission. Write to her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com.