Deja vu....Half a Century Later

My first home in Columbia was a small rental house just off Datura Road. That area is now in the news again with the opening of Whole Foods new store just two blocks away. I was tempted yesterday to venture down Datura after I had done my shopping, and with the feelings one encounters after not seeing a person for years, or a street or house, I had a pang of nostalgia. I had forgotten what a charming area it really is, Datura winding down a long hillside just beside Brennen School. Years ago there was a large vacant lot with a pathway cutting across to the school on the parallel street, as there was no through road in those days....and still not one today. Today there is a very large new home just built in that spot. Two houses were for sale, opposite each other just at the top of hill. I suddenly stopped and parked off the road in a makeshift driveway. People still tend to have pinestraw areas where they park their cars, as many of these houses have no garage. I walked around the side of the first house, to see through the backyard fence children playing in the schoolyard at noon, just like 49 years ago. Obviously someone had lived there many years, as everything looked like it had just been there a long time, not particularly attended to, but not totally neglected either. I noticed a distinct smell and realized it was a scent from the past, coming from the earth and the damp, one that I often noticed at my former home just at the foot of the hill. I was taken aback. We are so visual today; perhaps we have forgotten the power of certain smells to instantly take up back in time.

Years ago I stopped by my music teacher's home in Birmingham...this would have been in the 1960's after I had moved from Texas to South Carolina. Sure enough she came to the door and of course had no idea who I was. But I noticed a smell that instantly threw me back to the early 1940's when I would go to her house once a week for my accordion lesson. There was always this smell, and I finally relized they were an Italian family, and it was obviously the smell of garlic. I had the oddest sense of deja-vu, almost quaking in my boots as I use to do when going for a lesson I never much liked or prepared for.

The smell of Datura Road suddenly made me realize all those people I knew on that street had long since moved, or even passed away. Should I buy the house, restore it and move back again? I guess we all have those thoughts, if only for a moment, before we realize the train long ago left the station and won't be stopping there again.