...I turned a corner

Today it was the smell of lilacs that got me. I turned a corner, on a road I'd never walked down before, quite close to home, and bang... There I was a child of seven or eight again, dragging her feet on the way to the big houses under the railway bridge, where on some Sunday mornings, a tiny lady who lived in one of them sold us rhubarb, and bunches of mint for potatoes. Delicious smells...but before we got to them, we walked with our huge bundles of rhubarb along a crescent-shaped road that was full of (what I now know to be) lilacs, and the smell cleared everything else from your mind. For a while, everything...One of the saving graces of childhood. To this day I love lilac - the colour, the smell, the look of them...and of course the way they make my mouth water for rhubarb crumble.