Memories and mouning doves.
Today, this morning, I heard the mournful cooing of the dove. Every morning when streets are quiet here at home, and the cooing of the dove begins at light of day I am transported to my childhood home. This was decades ago. My home was part of a sleepy little community located in Southern Indiana. I still remember the clip clop of the one horse ice wagon, which would bring the coolness of a large block of ice to the waiting icebox in the back of our home. The iceman would carry his burden on the shoulder and use a large caliper shaped instrument to carry his frozen load.
These two memories stand out in my minds even today as I reminisce about my childhood and the very different environment that I faced then as compared to the environment that surrounds me today,. Even today, the cooing of the dove takes me immediately back to the cooing of the doves these many decades ago. It is a comforting sound. I feel transported the peaceful street lined with its Oak and Hickory trees. The doves cooed until mid morning and presented the only sounds of the early morning. Is it my own nostalgia of a childhood past, that brings all this to mind or is it the way our minds operate naturally? I know that sounds, smells and experiences of an earlier time, such as from childhood, remain with us way into adulthood. Even the cooing of the mourning dove brings home to us an earlier day when peaceful pictures of our home environment prompts a slide show of peace and comfort.
Are we, like the doves here today, are we mourning for a times past when things in our life were so different and much simpler? And if depressed, do we wish somehow to return to those happier times when life was the way everyone said it was supposed to be? A childhood filled with love, comforting relationships and all that.
I believe all of us prefer that our lives would and could be free of the tyranny that beset us today –namely the pain of depression that has us down and in its clutches. And we all wish we had a more comfortable way to escape this pain. For those of us have used the 12 steps of Depressed Anonymous recovery and who managed over time and with work to leave behind the hurtful memories of the past –we continue today to hope for ourselves rather than mourn the bleak days of the past.
SOURCE: Depressed Anonymous, 3rd edition. (2011) Depressed Anonymous Publications. Louisville.