LARSONING: August 2015

Just days before we were scheduled to return to Tbilisi my grandfather, whose health had long been in slow deterioration, passed beyond the veil. Having spent his last years a widower, it was a bittersweet separation. For me it marked the distinct end of an era -- my last living grandparent and last intimate link with the past. I found in his passing that I grieved anew for my grandma, ten years gone, his partner in life.

It marked the definitive end of the carefully crafted holidays, the Sunday get togethers, the family roadtrips, the surprise visits, the love, the laughter, and that special feeling whenever Grandma and Grandpa were around. I've felt the lack especially keenly since I now live so far away.

But there remains a place, a town, where my Swedish ancestors settled over 100 years ago, where our family has had a presence ever since. It constitutes for me an enduring physical link to the past. My grandparents inherited a parcel of the family land as a wedding gift in the 1940s, and it is as much a part of our family as our family name.

I visited Lindström with my dad a few days before the memorial service. He stopped by the bakery, the same one that has been there since at least his childhood, for an apple crispy.

We drove through the streets of town to our cabin, "the cottage" as my grandparents called it, which they renovated and made their home in their later years.

We parked and my dad went for a walk around the property. I sat in the car with my apple crispy, contemplating how I should feel, but in reality feeling a keen disappointment that this place would never again be as it once was.

What followed was unexpected. A gem in time. A true Proustian moment: I took a bite of the pastry -- it was buttery, sweet, delicious -- and "an exquisite pleasure . . . invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory -- this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence." (In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust)

I was transported to my youth in Lindström: sailing through the air on a tire swing bolted high up in the massive oak trees; lazing on a hammock wrapped in that musty old scent; running to the beach, coarse sand underfoot and the smell of dried fish in the air; teetering on Grandpa's stilts across the bumpy ground; hearing the churchbells ring in town; stealing a nap on any available surface; gazing at the soothing sparkling water, the epic sunsets; feeling the joy of cousins, childhood, anticipation, curiosity, possibilities, innocence, layer after layer, when rejuvenation was simple. I experienced my former world view, the small, comfortable one.

All this in a single bite.

My uncle and aunt will live there now, enlarging and completely renovating the former cottage. The large oak trees that once sheltered and entertained us were diseased and had to be cut down this summer, contributing to the "otherness" of the place. The adjacent property will be developed with mobile homes and the current view will be compromised. It will not be as it has been.

But I have found comfort in one truth: nothing can change the past. Nothing can diminish those beautiful, perfect, sepia-toned memories. And they are so precious to me.