Lavender Mothballs

Sweet scented lavender, mothballs and summer -
and time slips back. I am a child in the room
where great aunt Gertie lives within her memories.
She's stroking her grey cat; its contented purr
thrums in the shadows and we long for sun.

We eat the chocolate she gives us though it
has a taste of mothballs; she hoards it with her
lace-trimmed underwear.  She talks of things long past -
again she tells us how it happened that,
one day, she met the Queen, Victoria.

We shift and fidget, wish out visit over.
Beckoning us is her neglected garden
where a tortoise dozes on a warm stone path.
We think of outside, long to rediscover
the old toad crouching in a disused drain.