ABSTRACT
As I moved down a busy city street some days ago, I passed a store front where the door had been carelessly left partly open, and from it came a flood of that warm, sweet, yet gently sharp scent of bread baking. I did not pause, yet as I moved on my thoughts were filled with memories of other mornings, in a house where bread baking was an almost daily occurrence, and those familiar scents were a daily pleasure to a young boy’s senses. Another day, in the middle of our coldest January in years, I went into my back garden, and there, in a little glade formed by an encirclement of azaleas, I discovered a tiny scene laid out before me, where tiny twigs, unevenly cast away by the winds and thrust into the good soil, had been decorated with frost and little snow curls, making a scene of faery, which quickly brought back another youthful memory, when in an open field near my home on the shore of Lake Erie, I once found a similar scene. Under an overhanging berry bush, I discovered a tiny pond, where, in the shallow, frozen water, twigs had been trapped in the quickly-freezing ice and turned into miniature sailboats with snowy, crystal sails, little boats which seemed to rush across the pond lake in a race for the far shore. Each of these childhood memories, brought into consciousness by an adult experience, “recalling in tranquillity” an earlier moment of observation, created an instant in which the viewer, in C. S. Lewis’s words, was “surprised by Joy.”
