more chewing down clouds

I've just done something I've never done before. I finished I packet of floss. I've semi-kept a New Years resolution.
I was taken back to my grandmother's fruit cellar tonight for the first time in years.
Have you ever smelled a fruit cellar?
It was a strange room that was a continuation of other odd assortments: the laundry room with two fridges, the large dresser with a million nooks and trinkets that gave me the notion of sewing and was topped with large phone books. Beside it on the wall a phone with the turn dial (a peach colored phone), off to one side came the little bathroom with the unused shower and the toilet with the note taped to it: Please hold down handle for a few seconds. One wall was lined with those upper-wall windows characteristic of many basements.
And then there was the fruit cellar like a layer of closets.
First was the furnace/water closet that had badminton rackets and rubber kickballs stuffed in all the corners. Then it was the first room of the fruit cellar that was more of a pantry with boxes of cereal (Raisin Nut Bran!) and other things. And there to your left another closet with another naked light bulb to be turned on by the cream colored, cotton string: click--or that sound that is not entirely a click but more utterly indescribable. There were the jars of peaches, of jams, of homemade salsa, of pickled green beans, of applesauce on shelves of unfinished, worn-down planks--brown and splintery.
Have you ever smelled a fruit cellar?
Then I wasn't even five feet tall and I would peer into the kitchen cabinets to see if Grandma had left any Fruit Stripe gum with the zebra on the pack.

Then I was older and Grandma was leaving Halloween candy in all of her pockets--fun size snickers for us to find in various stages of age for years to come like some kind of comic relief.
I loved having her at my kitchen table that summer. I would like to always have someone to lounge around with after a meal who would tell me stories and laugh as I tried to balance a spoon on my nose.
She had a vanity in her bedroom which was another fixation of dreams for me. Imagine a table and chair and large mirror-covered wall all to the delight of my dreams of self-gilding. People who have vanities have places to go and stories to tell and nice clothes to wear and department store make-up. I could stare at her necklaces and high heals forever and dream of my own gold tube of red lipstick. And all of this primevally linked to a memory of a small black and white TV set playing a 1940's Sinbad production and the green carpeted study that branched off the master bedroom. A room lined with bookshelves and burgundy chairs for reading. Now there's another room of dreams.