ABSTRACT
The word ‘nostalgia’ was coined in 1688 as a medical term to describe acute homesickness (Boym 2007, p. 7). As language evolved, nostalgia shifted from a spatial ailment to a temporal one and was often used to refer to a longing for a time in one’s own life that had since passed. Over time, nostalgia came to represent an abstract sentimentality for an imagined or impossible past. The longing that the Nostalgic Runs instilled in me was different from the wistfulness that my mother felt for her own lived experiences. For me, those summer drives were sentimental, not because they accurately represented the past, but because the past that I envisioned could never be mine.
