LANGFORD, B.C. -- “This is The Nook,” Cat Peterson says, smiling as she welcomes you into a small room off the front foyer in her home filled with collectables from her and her husband Shaun’s childhood. “This is the wall of VHS that just keeps going.” This nook dedicated to nostalgia includes a floor-to-ceiling showcase of hundreds of movies on tape. “The is my Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen (collection),” Cat says. “My pièce de résistance!” After pointing out a stuffed animal version of the alien sitcom character ALF, Shawn shows an original VHS copy of the Star Wars trilogy. The couple play the old movies on a VCR attached to more than half a dozen traditional CRT televisions that are displayed thought the nook. “It’s become a little safe place for Shaun and me,” says Cat, adding no smartphones or streaming sites are allowed in the Nook. “It’s where you get to sit side-by-side with one another and have a connection.” It’s a place to be present while being enveloped by the past. “And just remember how awesome that time was,” Cat says, smiling again. A time that—in Cat’s case—was also complicated. “I was told I was adopted by a kid (when I was) in kindergarten,” Cat says. What happened next, when she returned home to ask her mom about it, turned it into a day she says she’ll never forget. “(My mom) was making spaghetti,” Cat recalls. “She went white in the face, dropped the spoon and she said, ‘We need to talk about this.’” And that’s when the only mom Cat had ever known revealed that she was actually her grandma, her dad was her grandpa, and her birth parents had died in a plane crash when Cat was just two-and-a-half months old. “(My grandma) was crying (when she told me), and I just remember holding her and being like, ‘But you’re my mom. So, it’s OK,’” Cat says. And it was more than OK, because despite her grandparents enduring the loss of their daughter, they were always ensuring that Cat’s childhood was as happy as possible. Now, the past is something she relishes when she interacts with the items in the nostalgia nook. “These random thinks that I thought I’d forgotten all spark joy,” Cat says. But to appreciate why she and Shaun worked tirelessly to transform their awkward room into their nostalgia nook, we need to go back to when Cat says she lost her spark for a bit when she was 38, after making another unexpected discovery. The dad who died in the plane crash wasn’t her biological father either. “(I discovered) my dad is alive and lives in Europe,” Cat says. “That was hard.” But although she endured a roller-coaster of emotions, when Cat finally did track down her biological dad and connected with him in person, it couldn’t have gone better. “It just felt like that missing piece of the puzzle in my heart was now filled,” Cat says, smiling. Healing her past gave Cat the energy to create the nostalgia nook in her present, which will ensure that even more happy memories are made in her future. “We have our family come over and sit (in the nook) and watch movies,” Cat says. “It’s something you can’t really describe other than it feels like the weight of the world is off your shoulders.”
