Nostalgia for Happier Times: Visits to Carmel

My OneDrive memories feed sends me pictures I’ve taken in prior years on that date. Lately, it has been sending me pictures of trips I took to Carmel, California, with my parents. Lovely pictures of happier times.

My parents honeymooned in Carmel in 1955 and loved the location. Periodically, they returned to vacation there. In 2006 and most winters thereafter, they rented a house near the quaint downtown for a couple of months. They usually stayed in California from early January into early March, some years longer, some years shorter, but they stayed at least a month. That continued until my mother’s Alzheimer’s kept her from enjoying the travel.

I retired at the end of 2006, and then was able to visit them in their rented house for a week or so during their California sojourns. Usually, I traveled to Carmel in late February or early March, ready to escape the last of winter in Kansas City. Some years I went alone, some years my husband accompanied me. I think I visited them every year except one from 2007 through 2011. My last visit was 2011—that I remember.

The OneDrive pictures have made me nostalgic for those years. It is a mark of my age, I suppose, that I am now nostalgic for things that happened after I retired. I was fortunate enough to retire at age fifty. I remember an older friend telling me, “Oh, your fifties. That’s the best time of your life.” And it was for me. I had retired to write, and I was finally writing—something I had wanted to do for years. I had decades ahead of me, and all my family was healthy and happy.

On those visits to Carmel, my parents and I—and my husband, if he was there—walked the streets of the charming town, visited old haunts from when my mother’s parents lived in neighboring Pacific Grove, and drove to Big Sur and state parks in the area. Everywhere we went, we strolled beach and garden paths. On rainy days, we shopped or read.

Each year, my mother had a little less grip on the present. At first, she repeated herself constantly and couldn’t remember answers to questions she had asked five minutes earlier. By 2010, we knew something was seriously wrong, and shortly after our trip to Carmel, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But throughout these years, she relished the scenery and sunshine, as did the rest of us.

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Their last trip to Carmel was in 2011. I visited them for a week of that trip, in late February through about my mother’s birthday on March 4. On that trip, we still walked and drove to our favorite sights. But on the rainy days, my mother could no longer read. She had a copy of The Thorn Birds, one of her favorite novels. She read the first chapter over and over, unable to retain what she saw on the page.

Her college friend came to visit one day that week. After our lunch on Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey, the friend and I cried together at all my mother had lost.

At the end of my stay, they drove me to the Monterey airport for my flight home. My father told me that when they returned to their rental house after I left, my mother just sat there, seeming depressed. He asked her if she wanted to go home. “Yes,” she said. So they packed up and drove back to Washington State the next day, cutting their trip to Carmel short.

My mother never returned to Carmel. Early in 2012, about the time they typically went to Carmel, she moved into assisted living.

The OneDrive pictures remind me of the full gamet of our Carmel trips, from the early days when we traipsed the Monterey Peninsula and beyond to the last visits as my parents’ traveling ability wound to an end.

Now, as this pandemic time continues, I am nostalgic for the years when we were all healthy, when we could travel freely. Perhaps my travel years will resume, though I foresee years when age and disability will prevent my husband and me from traveling. And I resent the pandemic’s theft of the past year.

What trips would you like to make again?