scents & stews

I often wonder what the others are thinking. Distant thoughts of what "should have been" or "could have come"; flashback nostalgia as so often I have had? Set into swing by subtle smell or melodic muse?

I reminisce of the days when my daughter was very young. Mists of music from her bedtime CD flicker past my present. I hum as I walk. I am anything but alone in this habit now, but memory makes me question just how common such practice was, before.

There are smells I miss the most. Billowing clouds drenched in laundry tides, folding up into cold air from a dorm or apartment building basement. The smell of bubble bath seeped in hot steam, trapped within the borders of bathroom porcelain and tile. Most of us would give just about anything for a hot bath these days, well, except perhaps the cherished and now rare cup of coffee. I doubt THAT smell will ever disappear from most human's desires, at least in my lifetime.

But here we reside, in this new life of ours, be it what it may. Discovering new scents and stews, planting new seeds of memory, regardless of our former selves or stories. Desperately trying to believe survival to be a blessing, regardless of all that's been, and of all that we each know is still yet to be.

But, without work, hands are idle; without strife, struggle no purpose. Without memory, no comparison grown for joy, for pride to achieve.

And I still have my daughter, though as young as in my memories she'll never again feign to be. For more reasons than years on earth, bittersweet to admit. Yet I can still sing to her the lullabies of that long lost bedtime CD, and somehow, even now, it can be of comfort to us both.