Memories

The carpenters are doing some woodwork in the office next door. I keep picking up those curls of wood that comes off when they slide that tool over the wood to even it out. I don’t know what that tool is called. I think a carpenter’s plane. I love the smell of freshly cut wood and I like to hold and examine a curl of sawn wood in my hands. It takes me back to my childhood. Not that I have any special memories of woodwork back then. Perhaps I used to play with wood shavings, I don’t know. But there is some vague picture in my mind of something packed in sawdust that used to come home when I was very little. I can’t remember what. I remember the smell of sawdust, but can’t get what was in the sawdust.

Other things I do remember are the sea salt seller, the cotton beater twanging his string as he walked on the street, the barber who used to come to attend to the men folk of the family (ours was a joint family then), the guy who got us rusk in big tin boxes, the dark room with its equipment where my father and uncles developed and printed their own photos, and the 60s style furniture, some of which we still have at our homes (all my uncles married and moved out one by one).

Oh, I got it! Slate pencils!!