There was a shop on the corner of the bus stop that he reached every morning to go to school. He only took the Bus when the weather was genuinely impossible to cope with on his bicycle.
It was usual for winter temperatures even to reach 8-10 degrees below zero, but it was not what stopped him, it was often the snow, which was easy to fall copious and intense.
Strangely at that time, with less equipment in the city by the municipality, nothing stopped because of the weather.
Schools, offices, means of transport, everything worked.
But with his bicycle, it wasn’t straightforward to stand in the snow or the ice beneath it.
He took the Bus, and in the winter, it was still dark at seven in the morning. The light and heat that came from the shop from the corner were stimulating and, after checking his pocket to see how much money he had, he slipped inside to look at all the things they had on display every morning.
It was not a shop where you could find many prepackaged products. It was more a bakery with excellent ideas for that time.
It wasn’t the only Bakery in the area, but for those in the neighborhood, it seemed to be.
The shop, for everyone, was the “bakery.” Maybe they even had a name, but nobody called it different.
The “Focaccia” in the morning was fragrant, and you could have them with onions, salted, or with sugar on top.
He loved those with sugar and took a piece of it every morning to take to school. Usually, he ate a bit while waiting for the Bus.
He did not drink any coffee at the time, a glass of water was enough, and he now regretted not having those focaccias every morning when he takes the usually “Morning” coffee.
He went back to the neighborhood years later, twenty years later, the Bakery was still there, but something had changed. There were packaged products of those he saw on TV in advertisements, and even the smell seemed different.
Indeed, something had changed……
Maybe he had only grown-up, and it was only the nostalgia that takes everyone from the past to make them remember in his mind something that was only different, but that he wanted to recognize as such.
But that smell, that smell remembered him well and that light in the morning as well. When the snow was falling, and the day was still dark.
The large flakes of snow that created shadows on the street and cut in two the light that filtered through the window of the Bakery.
If it was really like this or only the fruit of the memory that tends to exalt everything of the past, it was not a genuinely pressing problem.
This story had told him so many times that it had become a reality for itself; it was true and real even if it was different, perhaps in fact.