Sweetly Scented Yesterdays

     Remembrances wash through me unbeckoned but so welcomed, having been dormant, but very potent, memories.  They need but the simplest catalyst, such as a visit into an antique store that is jumbled and bulging with evidence of long-ago lives -- 100-year old sideboards and chairs, dining tables creaking under stacks of worn books, tarnished silver, chipped china, yellowed lace, and framed family portraits, eyes peering through time, their visage now resting in my hands.  All of these things suddenly transform my memories, call forth through the years and restore to me the musty basement of concrete floor and block walls, the foundation of the house my carpenter grandfather, Pop, built for his family.      
     Through the mists of time, down I go once more to the bottom of the steps, and just off to the left along the wall is Pop's silent workbench.  I detect the pungency of oil, and the perfume of freshly sawn pine.  To the right of the steps along the facing wall, are stout wooden shelves, heavy with canning jars full of long ago summers' tomatoes, beans, and peaches.  Oh, how I recall playing with my brother in my grandmother's, Mom's, backyard, zipping in and out of freshly laundered sheets on the line, my mouth watering with the splendid sweet aroma of peach-canning day, pure syrupy heaven wafting up the stairway and out through the screen door!  Mom's canning stove sits at the back wall of the basement, and in the sweltering end-of-summer days, the cool floor and walls down there make standing over the steaming redolent pots more bearable.

     But so many more memories swirl within that space.  To the left of the stove is Mom's dank zinc double wash tub with built-in scrub board, a rubber hose draped into one side from the adjacent ringer-washer, still sharp with bleach and 20-Mule Team detergent. The basement's center, including the mysterious space under the stairs, is a blur of slightly acrid stacked boxes with the stored paraphernalia of family life -- of Christmas ornaments and outdated clothes (too good to throw away) nestled among stinging mothballs.  Hanging from the rafters above the boxes is one of the most romantic remnants -- Mom's sidesaddle, its once-fragrant leather is now brittle with age.

     And in my mind, I've returned, circled once more back into the present, to discover that I'm standing in the antique store, caressing an ancient family photo, still resting in my hands.