We would have rung in the new year in the Pennsylvania house, my third and last Christmas with Shana, the year mom and John gifted us airfare to Europe, my first time there. Like most rookie tourists we’d jam all we could into a long week. I remember parts of London and Amsterdam but the route between Austria, Germany and France is muddled. A black and white photo of Shana, who I’d been dating since Pittsburgh, posing on the Eiffel Tower. But no memory of what we did or where we stayed or how we got there even. Pre-digital times are catalogued by picture prints now exiled to a shoebox in the garage, where all things go to die or be forgotten. Almost thirty years.

There is the tube stop John’s friend Rob told me to take from Heathrow, Arnos Grove, the way he pronounced it over the phone and spelled it out. Meeting him when he got off work for a walk to the corner shop and a bottle of beer from the Pakistani owner. We would have ferried to Amsterdam but zero recollection of that. Rented mopeds; mine got stuck in high gear and I’d snuck a cannabis cookie since Shana didn’t support me getting high so I had to pretend I wasn’t, which was hard. Can’t imagine anything worse, zipping through crowded Amsterdam like that.

When we got back we needed to renew our annual lease, but that trip to Europe had opened my eyes to how big the world can be so we moved across the country to Seattle, sight unseen. And I started going back to Europe almost every year, owing my love of it to my stepdad John.

There is a part of the park I rarely walk but I like the way the fog looks in the trees in the early morning when it’s getting light and the trail’s surrounded by ferns. How it twists through the forest across little streams and all the knobby trees covered in moss. It’s where I saw the bear once with her cubs and imagine if she’s burrowed down there still.

On a walk with Lily she said she’s feeling sad seeing old friends from high school because there’s a pattern to what they talk about that always starts with what’s new and then reverts to the past, what Lily calls the remember when? She’s sad because her roommate Cam will graduate college before she does and likely move somewhere else, so when they meet up in the future it will be like that. Their time together now is the remember when, she said.

We would have rung in the new year in the Pennsylvania house, or maybe it was that rental on the hill, with plastic sheets stapled over the windows in the winter and a milky view of downtown Pittsburgh. The remember when becomes a fiction not much different than the one we’re living now. Both a milky view.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Amsterdam, Creative Nonfiction, Europe, Memoir, netherlands, the-netherlands, travel