Time Travel

This afternoon, totally out of the blue, I bumped into my eight-year-old self. Suddenly she was where I was, right there, so real I could touch her. (“Me”?)

We were moving our son into an apartment in Pella. There are parts of Pella that I know as well as my hometown. Mom took me there every week for years—first for dance lessons and then for piano. We had family reunions there. I love the square, and the tulips, and Jaarsma Bakery.

But today, as GPS directed us to my son’s apartment, I found myself in a part of Pella I would have said I didn’t know. We went straight east of the town square. “I’ve never been this way before,” I thought to myself, watching the streets as they slipped by.

Until I came to a corner so familiar my breath caught. Abruptly I was in the passenger seat while my mom, driving our old sedan, turned left there, then right, into a driveway where we would take the eggs. We kept hens that produced more eggs than we could use.  In the back room of our old farmhouse, at the top of the stairs to the basement, Dad would arrange those excess eggs onto square brownish-gray molded paper trays—and sometimes I got to help. He would set those trays carefully down, layer upon layer, in a box designed to carry them securely. He would set them in the back seat of the car before my dance lesson and, while we were in Pella, Mom would drive east to this exact street, to deliver them to a local buyer.

The egg money probably helped to pay for my dance lessons. The eight-year-old who sat next to her mother all those years ago didn’t think about things like that. But with time travel, you see old things through older eyes.

And that’s what this was. Time travel. They say we don’t have that technology yet, but I’m here to tell you otherwise. I was suddenly there, or she (“I”!) was here. Completely in a moment that passed more than 40 years ago. I could smell the mustiness of autumn, see the porch lights that punctuated the gathering evening. I watched Mom set the box for next week’s eggs onto the back seat, and close the door. Heard her start the engine, ready to head home. Back down that route I was sure I didn’t know.