Do you get those 'memory' notifications on Facebook? The ones that show you what you were doing on the same date in previous years? I love getting to see old memories and remember the special things that have happened in my life, but sometimes even the most basic of posts can bring back a fond memory.
It's funny to see the progression of social media and the way I grew up when looking through old memories. When I posted about my sister's moving up ceremony, in 2010, I was a junior in high school. I kept my sentences short and sweet, there were no pictures uploaded, and only one person had commented on the post. Often, when I look at memories from earlier in high school, there's a lot of computer lingo included, like "ur" instead of "your," or no capitalization or proper grammar. By the time I was posting about my brother's moving up ceremony, in 2014, I had included a picture (that had been edited in a photo editing app on my iPad), and my parents had been on social media for a while so they were tagged in the post. My mom had uploaded a bunch of pictures from the ceremony, and there were many more comments and post likes than there had been four years earlier.
Also included in that post from 2014 was something that seemed second nature to us at the time: we were going to the local ice cream place to celebrate after the ceremony. How many times throughout my life did we go to that ice cream place to celebrate something? Softball games, cheerleading events, dance recitals, moving up ceremonies and graduations, last days of school... the list goes on and on. We never realized how good we had it because that place was always there waiting for us.
Now, we've been in Florida for almost an entire year. Actually, I'm pretty sure we've been here for eleven months as of today. Sure, we may not know everything about our new town, and we may feel like we're still struggling to adapt to our new lives in some ways, but it was a huge change and I think that we've done extremely well so far. But the one thing that we've absolutely failed at was finding a new ice cream place.
We live in Florida. It feels like summer at least ten months of the year! Yet there are no good ice cream places anywhere! Okay wait, I take that back... I've had some delicious soft serve on Disney property. But I'm not driving almost an hour just to get ice cream! Where's all of the small, locally owned, family businesses that serve ice cream to the small towns? I just don't understand how we haven't found good ice cream in eleven months. Believe me, we've tried. I mean, we've only actually gone for ice cream a couple of times since moving down here, because there's a lot else going on after a move, but we've definitely tried each of the local places at least once. There's been okay ice cream, kind of good ice cream, and pretty good ice cream, but there hasn't been any great ice cream like there was in New York. It's such a bummer!
So thank you, Facebook memories, for reminding me how good we had it in New York and how easy it is to not realize what you've got until you don't have it anymore. It may have been something small, like ice cream, that I thought about today, but it's amazing what those memories can bring up for you.
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Thanks!
Taylor