My grandparents owned a drugstore (chemist’s shop). It was close to our childhood home, so that leaves me many memories. Like the smell of the dozens of chamois skins piled up in the corner of the store. So soft. So spicy. Mmm. The shop had countless drawers with pigments for paints and other products. Such as boxes with “Panama Wood”, the predecessor of the Ariel washing powder.
Those drawers would have a life of their own. In 1982 the shop made way for an apartment building, and Anne and Jan, who did flea markets, came to help clean things up. Those wooden drawers came in handy for them to store all kinds of ‘junk’. Thirty years later, Anne comes to visit us in France, with a whole regiment of bastards in her camping car. The shop drawers of Pepé and Memé. I am speechless. Since then they have been incorporated into a showpiece of my own hand to store the junk in my workshop. From shop to workshop, indeed.
