Page 82 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

in the cold, snow and ice tell me who I am, over and over again. Remembering them makes me feel

good. In 2012, The Atlantic reported on a study first published in the American Psychological

Association’s journal Emotion and conducted at the University of Southhampton. The study linked an

increase in nostalgic feelings to cold temperatures. The college students participating in the study

claimed more nostalgic thoughts in cold rooms and on cold days, and, interestingly enough,

experiencing nostalgic thoughts correlated to an increase in the participants’ body temperatures.

Feeling nostalgia literally warms us up. I wonder if nostalgia may be an antidote to experiences that

leave us emotionally cold, sad, or depressed -- such as our changing climate.

I think again of the Shelburne Museum exhibit. The painted winter landscapes, the fishing houses,

snow covered haystacks, and snow globes reminded me of the winters of my childhood and young

adulthood. What happens to us when there are fewer of those memories to stir?

That day at the museum, after Kyle emerged from a dome-shaped shanty, we went back into the

museum. From the far edge of the gallery, we heard the low moan of a glacier calving. Kyle walked to

the source of the sound, a screen stretched across one full gallery wall. With his phone, he took a

video of the video. It was several minutes before a section of the Iceland glacier cracked, slid, and

plunged into the ocean. Kyle seemed small before the sound and the slow, certain crash of ice, much

as I was once small before the snow squalls filling Nebraska Notch. Will Kyle’s geographical

autobiography include the story of winter as told on a gallery wall? For what will he feel nostalgia?

Several years after my last ski with Gregg in

Nebraska Notch, I found my way to a job in the

White Mountains of New Hampshire, and thereby,

back to winter. On the day of the Winter Solstice, a

neighbor told me he believed that because their

lives were so entwined with the seasons, ancient

people knew they had to participate in ensuring that

the sun would return. Each year on the afternoon of

the Winter Solstice, in the long shadow of his

ancestors, my neighbor skied to his special place

on a mountain trail above his home to make sure

that the light would come back.