Hallway Smells

My family moved into my grandfather's house when he passed away a few years back. Grandpa's house used to mean someplace quiet, a museum of sorts, where memories and hard candy were plentiful. The furniture was never re-arranged in rooms that had not been disturbed since my aunts went to college. It was almost a sanctuary, a place of peace and neatness and quiet and Poppy's smile.
And then we moved in, and now it is my house, a place of loudness and companionship and brawls during baseball season and new memories. It is a different house now. But something of the past remains, and occasionally I am reminded of the way it was.

I wrote this last summer, when I was up (as usual) way past everyone else, walking down the hall to what is now my room.

I caught a whiff of him tonight
In nightly circuit down the hall;
Mingled with that which I am used
Was that which I can scarce recall.

Time was, back when I first arrived,
He's wait for me in every room
With imprint indestructible
Impervious to mop or broom.

But what these cannot, Time will do
Effacing old impressions til
New customs, ways of being form
And old familiars are still.

And so it is with ghosts, I find
Diminishing as Time goes on
Til naught but hallway smells remain
To bring back stories, and old songs.

It was just a whiff, an instant. Something indefinably, undeniably Grandpa. I think I disturbed the house in its sleep; it must have been dreaming of the old days.