Visiting the Country of Nostalgia, when I live in the very different Country of the Future, is odd. That is to say, I went to Longwood Gardens yesterday. My grandmother used to take me to Longwood regularly, because it wasn’t far from her house, and sometimes we used to go as a crew for special events along with my aunt, uncle, and cousins.

It’s a spectacular place, with many acres of garden, tidy forest, carefully tended landscape, and glassed-in conservatories, once owned by Pierre du Pont of chemical company fame and turned into a public attraction a long time ago. My grandfather and my uncle, both chemists, used to work for the company; my grandfather had a company building (since torn down) named after him, but neither of them would never have been invited to parties there. My mother and father once ventured onto the property and crashed a party, they told me.

It’s in the same place as when I was a child, though, and has the same general appearance. Most parts of the landscape are recognizable. Parts of the conservatories are the exact same ones I walked through with my grandmother when I was eight. However, you can no longer go through the working greenhouses along the fern corridor. Those have been put in another building entirely. There is more to the conservatory, including a lofty and rather bland steel construction with vaulted ceilings, running water, many paths, topiary, odd flowers, and hordes of people where the tropics and the desert used to be. The staff seem to have moved the tropics and the desert entirely.

That child running about, screaming, and picking buds off the carefully curated trees was not me, nor was that older woman accompanying the child my grandmother. However, when I tried to take a selfie to send to my own grown child, the photo that popped up on my phone appeared to be a picture of my grandmother, not me. There were wrinkles, and a softened jawline, and the eyes were narrow and lined with pink. I searched for an angle where I could recognize myself, and as a result I deleted dozens of photos.

And still, it was all so familiar. The little stage where we sometimes saw Gilbert & Sullivan productions? Identical. The long path between the tulips? Very much the same. The labels on the trees are the ones that were always there before.

I have been there often enough, in the past 65 years, that it is no longer jarring to find the parking lot over here, the visitor center over there, and the restaurant split off from the cafeteria and installed as a fine dining establishment down where the only bathrooms used to be. There are many, many bathrooms these days, a change that I applaud.

The fountains, which we used to sometimes come at night to watch, had been extensively repaired and were now open again. Staff turned them on to test them, and they sprayed spectacularly. I never saw the fountains up close (we sat in bleachers in front of the conservatory and watched them glow far off at the bottom of the hill), so I can’t tell you how they’ve changed.

I wandered around more or less content, though. The place was jammed with visitors, most of whom were nothing like my grandmother. I was wearing a quilted flowered short jacket that struck me the other day as perfect, but in this crowd I was an atavism.

The indoor conservatories were formal and stifling, and the outdoors was mid-April and therefore full of tulips, plants just starting to come up, trees just starting to lose their flowers and beginning to bud, and stately trees with lightning rods snaking up their sides. In the cafeteria, I had a perfectly acceptable bowl of mushroom soup (the area used to be, maybe still is, famous for its mushrooms) and a croissant for lunch.

My phone battery got drained and I couldn’t find an outlet to charge it; in that way, the gardens have stayed resolutely in the past. I charged for a while next to a trash can in the conservatory, then later in the cafeteria, and finally outside on a ledge in the picnic area. I needed the phone to work, because my grandmother was no longer driving me, I don’t have a car, and the bus company needed to be able to reach me.

I had bought a bus ticket from Philadelphia, you see, but now whenever there aren’t enough passengers to justify a whole intercity bus, the bus company arranges for Ubers instead, and then texts and telephones some of the passengers to let them know of the alternate arrangements. Then the passengers (many of whom do not speak English) and the drivers (many of whom do not speak English either) mill about anxiously, not believing the people who are getting the texts.

Eventually, I went out front to get picked up. The bus company emailed me, texted me, and then called me to tell me what car I should look out for, and I tried to find the other three passengers–“two Asian people,” said the company’s representative in a thick accent I couldn’t make out–and eventually found a pair of Chinese Penn students who spoke very little, as well as a Penn student from Hong Kong who was relatively loquacious. The red Toyota pulled up. The driver, Sobira, didn’t want to let us in, because we were not “Joseph” (the man who made the reservations), but I eventually persuaded her, and we loaded ourselves into the car and spent a silent hour in each other’s company. I gave Sobira an extra tip because the drive up 95 is horrendous.

After I arrived in Philadelphia, my phone rang. A voice spoke in my ear. “Pardon?” I said. They repeated themselves in an accent I couldn’t make out. “I can’t hear what you’re saying,” I said, and they said it once again. Finally, I understood, and I interrupted them to let them know that I was already in Philadelphia, not at Longwood, and I didn’t need another ride. They were not convinced. I eventually hung up on them.

I should either go to Longwood more often or not at all, I decided, and definitely not by (hypothetical) bus. I made arrangements with my friend Rebecca, who likes plants and owns a truck, and next February we will go together. She did not grow up going there, so she won’t experience the same sense of terrible nostalgia and age I keep having when I visit once a year, and in that way I may be able to venture more confidently into the future.