Childhood memory

He thought often and fondly of his childhood. He remembered the pleasure it had given him to walk around his grandparents’ garden, to pass through the laundry drying in the sun with it’s clean wet smell, to sit in the grass and do nothing, or to pluck the daisies and give them to his mother. His mother who smiled back then, sitting in a long-chair, lost in a book, and his father next to her, working away in silence. He remembered his grandmother’s perfume, and the smell of her kitchen floating in the air, and he could still see her hands, worn and stained by the passing of time, and the tarnished blueness of her eyes. He remembered his grandfather’s study, a forbidden place, filled with books and secrets, and at the heart of all the dust, the broken man behind a typewriter, searching for immortality and the time that was lost.