eight again

I journeyed up to Ducor again today. We drove through the streets of Monrovia, mentioned Joe's name at the 'gate' (which is nothing more than a man in a blue uniform who stands holding a rope stretched across the street) and continued on up the hill to the hotel. Peter, the guard who had been holding the rope, appeared at the entrance to the stairwell and indicated that he would show us around.

The place was much as I remembered it. The view of the city from the rooftop was just as serene, the breeze just as cool. Inside, everything was just as sad, just as broken, just as desolate. Remnants of abandoned life littered the floors and crunched underfoot as we picked our way through the empty spaces. It wasn't until we reached the third floor that everything changed.

I walked into room 332 and I was immediately and entirely eight years old again. The pile of discarded and forgotten things in the corner filled the space with the same musty smell that used to mean summer to me, and I closed my eyes and breathed deep the draught of childhood.

We used to go to the Farm every summer. Eight kids and two mamas, we would pile into a big blue van and drive out of the sticky confines of the city, into the freedom of July. I have no idea, now, how far away the property was. It could have been fifty or five thousand miles; all I knew was that it was an escape.

Being at the Farm meant two straight weeks of running wild. Our days were filled with exploring fields, rolling hay bales, building forts and fires and wading in the creek. Every afternoon we would pile back into the van and one lucky kid would get to sit in the driver's seat and steer the pack of us down the grass lane to the road. My mum would reclaim her place and position the van at the top of the hill that led into town. Ready? Her eyes would light up, we would start cheering, and she would take her foot off the gas, letting us coast down the slope, always trying to make it all the way to the pond we were going to swim in and never quite succeeding.

On the days when it rained, we sprawled out on the pile of mattresses that covered the floor of the bedroom where we all slept at night in a jumble of blankets and limbs. We played board games or listened to old records on a player that skipped if you rolled over too hard, laughing hysterically at the chipmunk voices when we accidentally played one at the wrong speed.

But my favourite place on the Farm was the barn. It was falling apart, pitted with groundhog holes and overrun by the bees that Grandpa kept in hives out back. The log beams that lined the walls had been worn smooth over time and we dug our toes into the cracks between them as we climbed up into the hayloft. That barn was filled with the same old hay, year after year, and it was packed down so tight that I used to lose my breath in a hard gasp if I landed wrong when I jumped out of the loft. I would lie there, momentarily stunned, the air around me alive with dancing dust and the musty smell of old hay. And then I would pick myself back up and climb to the top of the wall again.

Standing there in that dim room in an abandoned hotel that stands sentry over a ruined city, everything was somehow right again. Because it smelled like summer, and it smelled like innocence.