still choking up over this

https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2011spring/zoostalgia

We were playing at something—but then, also, it was real. We were learning how to take care of each other, how to be part of something bigger than ourselves, how, in many ways, to be human. We’re nostalgic for what they have now—youth, idealism, the future spread out before them like it’s a glassy turquoise sea of possibility and they’re hopping into their well-stocked little sailboats. And we want what we had then, too: arriving at the dinner table late and rosy-cheeked, our hair a mess of damp tangles. But mostly we want this, what we have now, which is all of it together, somehow—community and lasting friendship, love and gratitude, and devotion expressed now, as we expressed it then, through huge and tenderly prepared meals.