Apr 24, 2020 4 min read

The nostalgia is getting out of control around here.

The coronavirus pandemic lockdown has all of us pining away for happier times. NPR and other news outlets reported on the nostalgia phenomenon recently, but I was way ahead of them.

Two weeks into the lockdown, I began watching reruns of “The Waltons,” that 1970s show about a big family in the Virginia mountains struggling to make ends meet during the Depression. Although I was too much of a junior high nerd to exude the irony necessary to admit watching the show during its first run, I would eventually watch them all in reruns.

Now, John and Olivia and John Boy and the rest of them are part of my evening habit. First, I take Smoothie, the sheltie, for a walk around the neighborhood, then I load the dishwasher, toss in a load of laundry and attack all frequently-touched surfaces except the dogs with disinfectant. Then, and only then, do I treat myself to a $2.99 hour with my dusty barefoot clan.

The early seasons were the best, when John Boy wasn’t yet in college and little Elizabeth would hang around with Grandpa while the others went to school. John Boy was the center of the show – he and Mama and Daddy – and everyone else swirled around them.

But even TV kids grow up, and as the seasons went on, those middle siblings got their own story lines: Jim Bob was always wearing a leather pilot cap, who cares, and Jason was whining about not being allowed to play his guitar at some roadside honkey tonk. And don’t get me started about bratty Mary Ellen who was always keeping something that didn’t belong to her. She even gave away an heirloom typewriter those moonshiner ladies had lent to John Boy.

I’m now getting to the middle seasons, and I don’t like where this is headed. Lovely Erin, a middle girl like I am, is getting all pinched and prim and officious. I get that it was important for her to be a secretary, but really lighten up a little.

At I write this, I’m talking myself out of this whole Waltons habit. There are nine seasons and 221 episodes of the show – buying them one night at a time would cost about $700, and who has that much to spend on nostalgia?

I always knew I would bail before the season when Richard Thomas quits the John Boy role and is replaced by an actor who looked nothing like him. That’s when, and apparently why, Michael Learned quit. The writers gave her character, Olivia, tuberculosis and shipped her off to a sanatorium.

But, oh, the comfort of the Waltons when they were young.

Olivia looked so reassuring in her pale house dresses, and grumpy Grandma could always be found in a rocking chair on the front porch, shelling peas. Grandpa was always sneaking away to go fishing. The dad was predictably hardworking, pushing logs through the band saw at the mill, always wiping the sweat from the back of his neck.

But maybe the thing that most inspired my nostalgia was the Walton dinner time, when all 11 of them sat around the big kitchen table and talked over each other as they ate the food they had grown in their garden. And there was always, always dessert.

It’s not much like the holiday dinners we would host here before the pandemic, except for all the talking. And that’s what I miss most – what we all miss and are nostalgic for these days – the being around people. And just talking.