A scent of laundry

Sometimes it’s the barest trace of scent in the air that can flood the heart with so many memories.

Today it was while I was doing the laundry for daughter and me. I opened a jar of new environmentally friendly laundry detergent and there she was. My beloved Aunt Daisy.

She had a back kitchen and a front kitchen. The back kitchen, all glass and overlooking the walled back garden was where the washing happened. And she had all the equipment for it long before anyone else. My aunt had married well, you see. And her husband literally adored her. So she only had to bat her eyes and anything her heart desired materialized. She had a car before women really drove in Ireland in the 1950s. And was always piling it up to the roof with kids and heading off to the strand.

Her voice was distinct - throaty and always full of laughter and the cigarettes that laid an angora fog on it. Her door was always open and neighbours and relatives poured in and out of it all day like it was Grand Central Station. Everyone called her Dais. Her hair was jet black and in my time it hung to her shoulders in a mass of curls. She made everything from making fancy Russian salads to smocking hand sewn viyella dresses look easy. There was always fresh baking and fancy confectionary sitting on her counters.

Her big Aga stove in the front kitchen with the skylight above it was always going, heating the water and pumping out teacakes and biscuits, fresh bread and roast meat and poultry.

My uncle got concerned she might be over working herself with five children to take care of and got her a maid but Dais didn’t know what to do with her so spent a few years chatting with her over endless cups of tea and listless hooverings and then got her married off to a nice boy who worked in the shop next door.

I never knew her to have a bad mood or lose her temper or complain when both her mother and his mother moved in with them. I often found myself having tea there along with twenty others, some related to me, more often not. Fairy cakes and triangle sandwiches would appear as if by magic. No one ever left her house hungry and her door, opening on a busy main road, was never locked.

As children, we played endless hide and seek all over the house as it had a front stairs and a back stairs. She never said anything about the noise that countless running and screaming children made pounding through her house. The only time she yelled was to tell us there was icecream in the back kitchen or a tray of chocolate biscuits out of the Aga. And we’d all stop what we were doing as if by magic and find her, a cigarette stuck on her lower lip, one eye shut for the smoke, and always serving us, snotty dirty little kids, on her best plates, urging us in that wonderful voice of hers to eat up as there was more.

There was always more at her house.
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And now I'm off to catch up on some blogs...



In the words of my people:
Athbhliain Faoi Mhaise Dhaoibh, a chardai go leir!
Translation:
Have a wonderful new year, all my dear friends out there!
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