Last night, my husband and I went on a romantic walk down Memory Lane. It was my “night off” – we dropped the baby off at my mom’s house, went out for a cheap dinner, and then I said,

“You know what we used to do a lot but haven’t done in a looooong time?” with a big cheesy grin on my face.

My poor husband’s eyes did a total deer-in-the-headlights. I kept grinning at him and let him think for a minute. Finally he replied “Um…walk around the Broadmoor?”

YES!!!!!!!

For those of you who may not know, the Broadmoor is a historic 5-star hotel/resort here in the lovely city of Colorado Springs. It’s absolutely beautiful. We hung out there a lot in the early days of our relationship. The Broadmoor doesn’t care if you’re a guest there or not. They’re equally nice to everyone on the property.

My husband took me to dinner there, at The Tavern, for our one-month anniversary when we were dating. We’d sometimes go and just walk around the lake in the twilight hours, hand-in-hand, just talking. If we needed an escape from life we’d go to The Tavern and split a dessert and just relax in the dim lighting, listening to the band, watching couples hop around the dance floor.

It’s the place where he went down on one knee and asked me to marry him, standing next to the lake. We went back to that spot last night. We retraced our steps and ended up right where he proposed to me. We sat on the cushy lounge chairs and talked about our past, our future, our life as it is right now, and just drank in the beauty of our surroundings. The flawless landscaping, the gently rippling waters of the lake, the beautiful old buildings, the majesty of the mountains in the background, the absolutely perfect just-after-sunset-but-not-quite-dark-yet light.

We also spent our wedding night at the Broadmoor. I remember pulling up to the little guardhouse at the entrance, in my parents’ big white Jaguar, my husband in his tux, me sitting among the white fluffy folds of my wedding dress, and the guard said “Mr. and Mrs. Frank! We’ve been expecting you.” As we drove the rest of the way to the hotel entrance I squealed “He called me Mrs. Frank!”

I love revisiting beautiful memories. We’ve spent a lot of time doing that recently. I think it’s because our life has changed so much. We’re constantly on the go these days. Taking care of the baby, taking care of our new house, husband is working, I’m trying to have a social life…we don’t spend a lot of time just remembering how beautiful our life really is. So we’re trying to be more intentional about that.

Memories are a fascinating thing. They’re so complex. The feelings they evoke can range from sadness to elation and anywhere in between, and sometimes even two or three feelings combined.

I’ll never be able to think back on my son’s birth without feeling a pang in my heart along with the joy. A beloved family member passed away suddenly just a few days before he was born. I’ve never had such joy and such pain exist in the same moment. But at the same time, whenever I think about my lost loved one, I smile. She left us with so many warm, funny memories. There is always laughter when we share remembrances of her. There have been tears, yes, and there probably always will be. But there are also warmth and smiles. How beautiful is that?

There is another period of memories in my life that are a huge conflict for me. The conflict is less than it has been in years, thanks to some closure I got from talking to a wonderful pastor at my church, but it was a struggle for a very long time. There are a lot of memories from that time in my life that are painful. So painful I would sometimes collapse in a heap of angry tears when they came up. There were good memories in there too, but I couldn’t enjoy the good memories without the bad ones slipping in there. So I shut all the memories up in a mental box and tried not to visit them.

I don’t know if that was the right way to deal with that. Because I did that, all those memories feel like a dream. They feel like they never happened. It’s a very odd feeling. I’m at the point now where I can enjoy the good memories and the bad ones don’t paralyze me anymore. But the good feelings still have that weird dreamlike quality about them. I kind of wish they didn’t, but oh well. Regret isn’t going to change that fact. I’ll enjoy those memories for what they are, and I have the logical knowledge that they really did happen. Maybe someday the logic and the memories will collide and it will feel real again.

Now that I have a baby, who is growing so fast, I’m making a concentrated effort to keep the memories real. The first several weeks of his life could have been a fog, what with the sleeplessness and all, but I made sure to take the time to just sit and stare at his little face peeking out of his swaddle and savor those moments for what they were, so the memories feel very real. I still get warm fuzzy butterflies in my stomach whenever we drive past the hospital where he was born. I love that. I hope it never goes away.