Tempus Fugit

The Header pic was last week until three days of high winds took all the leaves away. 

 Time does fly.  That is a certainty..  You celebrate New Years, you turn around twice and it's the 4th of July.  Independence Day.  Blink three times and it's Christmas.  Life is like a windstorm blowing through.  The short span isn't obvious until you get older.  Several people have written their comments to that phenom when I have written of it several times before.  How time seems to drag by on heavy chains when you are a child or teen...and somewhere in your twenties, it seems a normal type pace, but then...then it speeds up.  Never enough hours in the say when you are busy...and that idea I said at first..turn around and months, a half a year of your life gone, up in smoke. 

Then, I was reminded yesterday on the way home after smelling creosote  heavily scenting the outside air as I drove toward the hospital.  I smiled...and in my mind went back to seven years of age.  Where I and a cousin one year older than I were standing beside a country roadside while my mother was in a store.  It was summer...hotter than a fire place all roaring in the winter and the creosote oder was rising up from the roadbed.  It was a good day for Rich and me and we were having a sweaty, hot but enjoyable time while waiting for mother.  I go back to that time every time I smell that oder.  Rarely do,  but always a sweet memory.  Mother brought us out a Coke to share.  Then  we got a Cremesicle. Orange sherbet coated vanilla ice cream. 

Fragrance, smell if you will, is a perfect Time Machine.  If I smell Johnson Paste Floor Wax (I'm sure it is not made any more) I go back to my grandmother's beautiful home in Roanoke.  Hardwood floors gleaming throughout all levels, highly polished and always that paste wax oder.  The quiet of a ticking clock...the beautiful wood cabinetry, the leather chairs and couch...the Windsor Chairs in the reception area, the wooden stair case upstairs; the heavy wooden front door with ornate thick, leaded and stained glass panels in it..so many things.  Green window shades at every window pulled just right for day.  I see them all sniffing floor paste wax.  Go outside of Grandma's house, and when the fog lifts see the coal dust settled on the porches from all the coal furnaces warming homes all over the city.  And the distinctive smell of coal burning in those furnaces.  As a little girl, I disliked it, but if I could smell it now, I would smile. 

Occasionally in a dream I go back there and hep wash dishes with a bar of Ivory soap.  Yes.  Seriously.  I'm not that old, but they were.

What do you remember most from your earlier childhood?  And did you also collect Little Lulu and Superman and Donald Duck?