Last weekend my dad and littlest brother were in town from Florida for my graduation. After the festivities and celebration were over, the three of us decided to drive up to Smithfield, Utah and visit my grandparents for a day. My grandparents have lived in the same house since 1971 and my dad hadn’t been there in over 20 years, so naturally, he was excited. But maybe moreso to show my brother and I the rich, memory-laden history of his past. That’s what I want to delve into here: the power of nostalgia memory evokes and why such emotion is important both in our lives and to Mormon literature.

My dad grew up in Richmond, Utah just above Smithfield. The first house he lived in had been torn down, but the second was still standing and he told us about the horse barns and sheds that were also just memories. He lived right next to the Richmond cemetery and described elatedly how they used to play on the fence like they were soldiers and sled down the road in the winter. Perhaps what impressed me most, however, was just how much he remembered. As he drove by each house, going well below the speed limit (causing me to glance behind us repeatedly and make sure we weren’t blcoking traffic), he would point to a house and name the families that used to live there, who his best friends were, the people that he played with, specific memories of events he had.

What was amazing to me about my dad’s reminiscing was the fact that in 1990 he suffered a near-fatal car accident which affected his memory. My mom and I are always getting on him for going into rooms and then not being able to remember what he went in them for, or his innate ability to hide birthday presents so well he can’t even remember where they are. But this part of his memory was intact. Dauntingly so. A sense of respect, warmth, and melancholy came over me as we crawled along the roads of Richmond. Thinking back to my childhood in Ohio not 20 years in the past, I realized I did not have the same richness of memory, the same caliber of remembrance. I could not name the inhabitants of each house, I could not tell you with the same detail what I had done.

My dad spent his early days as a farmer and told us tales of he and his siblings damming the irrigation system and getting in trouble with the farmers down the road (which was especially “naughty” since his dad was in the Bishopric at the time — to think that a Bishop’s children would engage in such mischief!), how they started working when they were 10 and 11 as paper boys, and the times his parents would equip the kids with plastic bags and paring knives to see who could gather the most wild asparagus growing along the side of the road.

After our hour-long drive to each of his homes and high school, we returned to my grandparents home in Smithfield and went into the backyard. My dad told us how the Church bought some of my grandpa’s gardening land to put in the nearby chapel, and I listened intently while looking at the swingset made of simple chains and boards, and the garden that my grandpa continues to work by hand.

In my moment of nostalgia, thinking of farm life, the days before cell phones and ipods (please note I am not trying to advocate that technology is a vice we necessarily need to eradicate from our lives), and the happiness my grandparents exude with their simple life, I had a thought: this is surely what the prophets meant when they counseled to be in the world, not of it. Quiet conversation around the dinner table with a game of cards afterwards, accompanying your grandma to take a loaf of bread she made by hand that afternoon to the neighbor’s three doors down, sitting with the sun on your back on the ancient couch in the living room perusing photo albums of your ancestors and cousins; this was the best of everything.

I was led then to think of the scriptures and the admonition of so many ancient prophets who cried for us to “remember, remember” and I stopped to think how often and aptly I applied that specific counsel to my own life. The Mormon faith is rich in heritage and recollection from the pioneers to the even ancienter Nephites and Lamanites. Remembering is an essential part of our foundation in the gospel of Jesus Christ, especially when such recall is posited toward our Savior and his sacrifice.

The idea of nostalgia is umbrella-like in that its different applications can be attached to almost all aspects of Mormon literature, be it through reading or writing. I think that our ability to remember is directly influenced by our knowledge, bringing up some of the notions raised by our beginnings and the “Why we’re doing this” post. In order to adequately remember and use that as a positive force in our lives, we first have to be aware of the past in its entirety and authenticity. This is one of the reasons Mormon Renaissance exists: to return to the past in order to understand and engage in critical conversation in the present with the depositions of the past.

When my father was telling his stories my resonation with them was not only because they were great stories, but because they were real, authentic, and valuable stories; ones that represented a part of myself. So to with our religion–it’s a part of who we are. A part that we want to treat, celebrate, and remember; one that we will continue to use as we discuss and build ourselves into the future, for any good treatment of Mormon literature is incomplete without it.