My grandmother looked up from the chair where she had taken
to reading. The door still stuck on one corner, and I still stumbled
on that step where they had carpeted right over it all. I smiled
then. It was an easy smile. Somehow, it was easy to smile here.
The smells of home were all around me, dust and vegetables, some perfume
that I had no idea of its brand, and a filled cookie jar. The memories
manifested in a hundred singular and distinct scents offered in combination.
My children came in and exploded upon the stillness as a firework in
the night sky. Surely they could feel it too. One child, touching
the old piano, sent a lone note lingering through the fondly cluttered
familiarity of the living room. The next one hugged her Great-grandmother
and received the expected kiss. The youngest, always the explorer,
rushed off to explore the mystery of the old basement.
How many ghost stories had my aunts and uncles and I told down there?
How many secrets were shared under the thick quilts of the tiny downstairs
room? The coal furnace down in the basement still grumbled as ever.
Though the potato cellar was now just a storage place, I could yet smell
the thick rich scent of the indigenous vegetable, the food that was a staple
in the lives of my ancestors.
I turned and looked around myself. Each picture in its frame and
every book that had been in the same place for decade's spoke to me,
and spoke of me. Relatives both living and passed on smiled from
behind the glass. The volumes of Greek Mythology that was my companion
on long summer afternoons, and Freckles'... who tickled the exploring nature
of a youthful self, each in turn whispered their greeting. This house
was my center, my returning. I was molded within its walls, and formed
by its contents. . . yet more importantly . . . I was born of its
love.
M Steed---<--{@ Rose '98
