The Loofah
Chapter One – The Loofah- A Story of Magic, Memory, Love and a Lifetime.
There are objects in a lifetime that become more than what they are. A photograph. A ring. A folded letter kept too long. And sometimes, something as simple as a loofah — a small, ordinary plastic thing — becomes the doorway to everything you thought you had forgotten.
I didn’t know that the first time I held it. I didn’t know it would let me step back into the rooms of my childhood, or walk again through the streets of Frankfort, or hear the voices of people I loved long before I understood what love meant. I didn’t know it would let me see my own life with new eyes — or let me feel, all over again, the moments that shaped me.
But the loofah did all of that. It became the keeper of my memories, the lantern that lit the past, the quiet magic that let me return to the places where my heart learned how to beat.
This is the story of what I found there — the magic, the memory, the love, and the lifetime that waited for me on the other side.
I didn’t expect anything unusual from a dollar-store loofah.
One morning last year, I stepped into the shower the way I always do—slowly, carefully, the way an almost seventy-five-year-old man learns to move. I reached for my usual soap and the new plastic loofah I’d picked up the day before. Tie-dyed bristles, bright red collar. A dollar and a half, thanks to inflation. My old one had begun its slow surrender.
The new loofah bloomed with foam, more than I’d ever seen. It covered my arms, my chest, my legs, my face—until I seemed to disappear inside it. For a moment, I wasn’t sure where I was at all.
When I rinsed, the world returned. But not the world I expected.
The towel I reached for was from my childhood—thin, faded, patterned with little blue stripes. The bathroom around me had shrunk into memory: the sink shorter, the mirror smudged with fingerprints, the tiles that tired shade of blue that always looked “clean enough.” A plastic cup of cartoon pink stood beside the faucet—the same cup I’d used to rinse my mouth a thousand school-day mornings.
Beside it lay my mother’s long red brush, its stubborn bristles holding a few strands of a younger me. I reached toward it, half afraid my hand would pass straight through. But it was solid—warm, as if someone had just set it down.
A drip from the faucet echoed like a clock ticking backward. The air held the faint powder scent of mornings before school.
I stepped back, towel around my waist. The door-frame seemed taller. From the hallway came my sister’s voice—“Come on, I’ve got to go.” The house stirred the way it had for years.
In my youth, I always tried to reach our one bathroom first. Today felt like all those mornings—except fifty years had passed.
My heart tightened, not with fear, but with the tenderness of return. Somewhere beyond the kitchen wall came the clatter of pans and a soft, familiar humming—a tune I hadn’t heard in decades.
Dressed, though water still clung to my skin, I breathed in the air of those days—fresher, lighter—and for a moment, my heart beat stronger. The smell was heavenly.
I opened the bathroom door and stepped into another memory. My older sister, twenty years old and steady on her feet, brushed past me. “It’s about time. I have to get to work.” She moved into the bathroom without another word. Two ships passing in time. Her life would later be interrupted by a stroke, but here she was—vibrant, alive.
In the kitchen, my mother looked up. “What do you want for breakfast? I have an egg sandwich and there’s milk.”
No fear of cholesterol entered my mind. Just a simple, “That sounds great.”
She asked about my plans for the day. “I resigned at Jewel starting this Tuesday, and then I start next Monday working construction with Bud. I have to be there at 5:30 am, but he is going to give me a ride. After the summer I plan on applying at Cat and registering at junior college. You know, Classes, then work,” I said.
“And after you graduate next week? You aren't going to college full-time?”
“First I’m going to find a job,” I told her, “then start junior college, I've already enrolled.”
She hesitated. “What about the draft? Vietnam?”
“If that happens, I guess I’ll go.”
“You know if you went to school full-time, you could get a deferment.”
“I know, Mom. But I’m not afraid of serving. If I get drafted, I’ll do what I’m ordered.”
In the next few minutes, I ate my egg sandwich and drank my milk. I saw my younger brother—now gone—and both of my younger sisters, one of whom is gone as well. I talked with my mother, long gone, and my older sister. My father had already left for work, and my older brother was away at a service academy.
Everything I told my mother that morning—working at Cat in a management training capacity, enrolling in college, being drafted, serving—came to pass. It did not show the rest of my life, that I would be injured badly while serving, that I would go to college on the G.I. Bill and the Illinois Veteran's scholarship, go to graduate school and have a long and distinguished career, it didn't show. It also didn't show that I would lose my mother, father, sister, and brother far too early. Nor did it reveal that I would marry the love of my life and have two children.
Saying goodbye, I walked out the back door of our home and stepped straight into my driveway—into my car, more than fifty years in the future.
I stood there for a long time, my hair still damp around my shoulders, the morning sun warming the hood of my car. I didn’t know what had happened. I only knew it had been real.
Thanks to a new loofah, I had experienced a morning with most of my family, one week before I graduated from high school. A memory I had somehow forgotten.
I am mostly retired now, working in my field to cover for someone on vacation, but I am happy — happy for my family, my life, and my loves. I had arrived back in Tucson on the last Friday of May 2026. Just leaving a work assignment. And as strange as it sounds, I realized something as I stood there in the driveway where I occasionally work:
The past isn’t gone. It’s just waiting for the right doorway.
And I think I’ve found mine.
I hope that loofah works tomorrow.
Copyright © Kevin M Davis | Year Posted 2026
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