Memories, one step on

I remember sitting on my Grandad’s lap watching my two-years-younger brother take his first steps, backlit at the end of the hall by the light from the small window beside the front door.

So small an area, that hall, so strongly influential, so readily recollected, it was papered halfway up with bumpy brown and shiny anaglypta.

Above was cream and hung with English hunting prints,  the startling scarlet of their coats buried deep in my subconscious, arc-ing resonance when, half a century later, I discovered in Oxford’s Ashmolean museum Uccello’s ‘Hunt at Night’  

Although the truly horrid under-stairs pale blue china bunny is now gone, a bought-for-sentimental-reason, small brown version lives in a cupboard in my bedroom and will not allow itself to be discarded

The circular barometer, mystic numbers and gold shiny arrow-headed needle a source of fascination, and tapped daily by my Grandad, now hangs in my sitting room:  I still seek understanding.

And just this year, the long-forgotten hallstand, near-black wood, brass hooks and small square mirror, green lily-patterned tiles and tin tray for umbrellas, reappeared in the entrance hall of Luke Darbyshere (my fictional detective)’s flat.

This was a resppnse to a challenge set by Bill Lapham on Six Sentences:  having asked for six sentences beginning 'I remember' we were to select just one and write five more from that, using our imagination.   This didn't quite stick to the rules but is an illustration of how such 'I remember' moments are re-used  in our writings.