Blog

Updated March 11, 2021

My pharmacist is renovating and as part of the process, they’ve built floor-to-ceiling shelves made of pressed wood for their files. As I walked in the door, the smell of sawdust instantly transported me back to my childhood or, more specifically, the basement of the building where my mormor and morfar (maternal grandparents) lived on the first floor.

It was an old building, so old that only cold water was piped into the kitchens and there was one toilet per floor, out on the landing by the kitchen door and shared between two apartments. There were two entrances — the front door for visitors in the back door leading to the courtyard find the building. This was the working entrance, leading you into the back courtyard or further down, the basement.

Taking those back steps to step side the kitchen and continuing past the door to the courtyard took you into that basement and another world. Down there, it was dark, lit by serviceable fixtures without the luxury of coverings, the bare bulbs casting stark shadows on the concrete walls, interspersed by a warren of rooms on both sides.

The smell down there was unique, scents from each of the rooms contributing to the chill clay-like aroma of being below ground in an unheated place. Some rooms were storage, especially cold storage for preserves and the potatoes that my grandfather dug up in his garden plot not too far from the building. The earthy, musty smell of the potatoes reminded me of summers spent with my morfar in his garden. He’d carry his spade resting on his shoulder and I’d talk endlessly as we made our way to the plot to get potatoes for dinner. He’d do the digging and it was my job to find the nuggets of golden potatoes hiding in the rich loamy upturned soil.

Another communal basement room was for washing — large metal kettles and vats sending out clouds of soap-scented steam, washing boards and lines for hanging the washing in the winter. In the summer, the back courtyard would be filled with laundry dancing in the wind and I’d run between the billowing sheets, playing with the feral cats that my mormor and a few other tenants fed every day at lunch time. Mormor always warmed the milk for them and I remember walking next to her, carrying the food, out the back steps to the shed, excited cats weaving around our ankles.

When it was washing day, I’d accompany mormor to the basement, reveling in squeezing dishcloths and tea towels, just the right size for my small hands, over the rippled surface of the washboard, the warm soapy water flowing through my fingers. In another room, there was a large laundry wringer for table cloths and sheets and I found it endlessly fascinating. You fed the large pieces of wrinkled fabric into one end and by turning the crank, pushing hard to make it go around, and magically, it was smooth and beautiful when it came out the other end. I’d help mormor fold the sheets and the table cloths, standing far apart from each other, folding in unison until it was a long, narrow length and ending by walking towards each other, rhythmically folding a child’s arm length over and over until we met in the middle.

But the best room in the basement was my morfar’s workroom. He was a cabinetmaker and built several of the dressers in my mother’s place, dressers that will be passed to my sister and I to take care of until they become passed on again. It was this workroom that held my favourite smell came, the scent of wood. The room was filled with it, all kinds, from soft pine, to the harder woods, like mahogany and teak, intermingled with the tools for his work. The floor was covered with wood shavings, the perfect toy for a little girl. I remember sitting underneath his workbench while the rhythmic swish of his plane rained curls of the thinnest wood all around me. I would unfurl them, stretching out the soft lengths, tuck them behind my ear, creating ringlets in my straight hair while sitting in a lake of fragrant swirls, sometimes ankle-deep. It was heaven.

And thanks to my pharmacist, for a little while this week I was there again.