Ewoks and cherry stones

Friday Fragment #19

There is nothing that resuscitates the past quite like the sense of smell. From this one trigger words, sounds and pictures spill – things so impossibly lucid, narratives so vividly recalled that gaps of forty-plus years feel bridged in a second. On Friday, it was the perfume of a friend’s roses – her current pride and joy – cut and sitting in a vase on the counter of her restaurant. They revived memories of the garden of the old house in Bosworth Road, where almost everything was overgrown or showed its neglect via age or damage, except for the rose bush in the corner, near where the slack was stored, next to the shed that housed the coal. The sweetest imaginable scent returned Dad and the shovelful of ashes, brushed from the hearth scattered at the base of the bush. Broken egg shell there, too. Those flowers flourished – pink and apricot – and gave their fragrance each time we took the two short steps that connected one path to another. My friend was every bit as intoxicated with them; her own memories of years ago mixing with the giddyness of now. With each dish that appeared for photography that afternoon, I would capture it and then return to the bar area to signal for the next plate, but essentially to be back with Dad again, and to be kicking a plastic football with Pete, and to be animating the limbs of Ewok figurines in the nearby foliage of that childhood garden, and to be lying inside the dens we built with deckchairs and Battenberg-hued bed sheets, on the lawn we sometimes clipped with a pair of nail scissors, littered with cherry stones, under the shade of the tree that towered higher than the roof, just outside the sitting room window. I took two pictures to remember something of the memory of the smell that returned me in a flash to my childhood and its incomparable happiness.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter (sometimes published a day or two after Friday!).