4 Birth Months Whose Nostalgia Is A Secret Weapon

You went looking for one photograph and somehow spent half an hour remembering an entire summer. The terrible haircut. The friend who could make anything funny. How much you loved a place you were once so eager to leave. For a little birth-month reflection, these four months have a gift for making all that remembering useful.

March

March, your memory has excellent taste in odd little details. You remember the orange curtains in a neighbor's kitchen, the stories you invented on long car rides, and a book illustration you wished you could step inside. Years later, those things still find their way into what you make. A room you decorate has a little of that kitchen's warmth. A story you're writing borrows the feeling of watching the road disappear into fog. Your nostalgia gives you a collection of influences that nobody else has assembled quite the same way. Even the things you once considered embarrassing can become interesting again. That wildly overdecorated childhood bedroom? You were onto something with the stars on the ceiling.

July

There are people who know your friend's job title, July, and then there is you, remembering the dance they made up in a parking lot fifteen years ago. You hold on to versions of people that their current lives don't always leave room for. The responsible parent was once the person who kept everybody laughing until sunrise. The friend having a difficult year used to sing with astonishing confidence and very little regard for the tune. When you bring up those memories, they get to spend a moment being someone familiar to themselves. A conversation that began with errands and obligations can suddenly become helpless laughter. Your shared history gives an old friendship somewhere to go when neither of you has any news.

September

You can feel oddly affectionate about your first terrible apartment, September. The drawer that never closed. The two mugs that constituted your entire collection. Eating dinner on the floor with someone you loved and feeling ridiculously pleased that this was your life. At the time, you were figuring out almost everything as you went along. In memory, you can finally see how much you managed to build from that uncertain beginning.

That is useful when another beginning makes you feel inexperienced again. You remember how a strange neighborhood became somewhere you belonged, how a routine took shape, how you gradually stopped needing directions. The affection you feel for that earlier chapter includes someone who learned their way through it. Starting over gets a little less frightening when you remember that person is you.

December

Someone mentions a game you haven't played in years, and you're already explaining the rules, December. Badly, because you're laughing. Soon you're moving a chair out of the way while the most skeptical person in the room announces that they are only watching. Ten minutes later, they are disputing a score. You remembered how much fun this could be before anyone else quite believed you.

That is where your nostalgia becomes wonderfully contagious. You keep track of the things that made an ordinary evening feel like an occasion, and you are willing to suggest them again. People might groan when you bring out the old favorites. They also stay for another round.