We have been on the run since our trip to NYC. Milt has been re-editing Video Letters From Prison based on the great info we got from Fernanda. In the meantime, the plot for our strawbale has been leveled and a load of clay arrived on the property today. Now that he got the rough cut done, we will be seriously looking at “rasising the roof” and laying the foundation for our new house. I feel a little bit like I am in a dream. I’ve had a pattern in my life of not really believing good things can happen to me. It is strange, because great things DO happen to me. My life is blessed beyond what I could ever have asked for, and yet I look at that leveled plot of land and have trouble “seeing” the house there. I’m working on it–both my belief systems and my vision.
I remember when my dad built our first house. I was in junior high and the housebuilding took two years and all of our help. My sister Becky and I used to sit on the floor (no walls or roof) of our “bedroom” and dream about when we would be actually sleeping there. In the winter we used to jump off the “floor” into the snowdrifts below. I can remember digging ditches, nailing siding, and doing whatever else was required. I also remember that we had to move in before it was done and our living space was the downstairs “rumpus” room. I think that is was an early name for “family room.” There were 7 children and my mom and dad but we did take over the bedrooms so it wasn’t totally a camp out.
June 18th was the anniversary of my Dad’s death. It was also the day my parent’s married and my sister’s birthday. She was born one year after they married. I think, since I am thinking about Dad and building houses, I will post a little thing I wrote about him several years ago.
Later,
Jamie
My Father’s Hands
Last night I dreamed my father gave me a beaded bag with trails of heart-shaped beads wandering across the pale cloth. Something in my soul wants to finger the trail of beads to discover what he meant by this gift. Does he mean follow this trail, my darling girl, the trail that is both made of the heart and leads to the heart?
So many books about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons-but what of the daughter caught by a golden thread to her father’s soul? What of that child?
I am a grown woman, a grandmother now, who looks down at her own stubby fingers one day and sees her father’s hands. They are not the hands of a piano player or a dancer but the sturdy hands of labor, of getting things done, of endurance and strength. Iremembers his hands in one scene and then another: tying myskates in winter, sketching the walls of his new house, or solving an intricate problem on paper as if each blunt fingertip had its very own brain, and only when his hands moved could he think.
I remember the warmth and strength of his hands as he kneaded the calves of mylegs late in the night when growing pains hurt badly enough to wake me up crying. I see his hands holding cards in a favorite game of whist or bridge or gently patting the shoulder of a friend he meets on the street. I see his two hands resting on a steering wheel while driving to Grandma’s house or holding the very edges of the Sunday paper after church, a plate of powdered-sugar donuts hidden on the other side of the news. I remember the way my father’s hands would pick up my needlepoint project and run the yarn through six rows tugging just a little too tightly so that I could always see in the tapestry of the finished work, his rows beside my own.
It is his hands I see holding a Louis L’Amour book late in the evening letting go only to take a sip of the beer warming on the side table; his hands building two of our houses to shelter those he loved most; his hands fashioning the ugliest boat ever out of wood and plank; his hands turning wood, twisting metal, picking berries–and then building a special screen to roll the berries down to clean them.
I see his hands playfully slapping my mother’s backside or holding her against the fridge to steal a kiss, and his hands wielding the razor that plowed a smooth path across his lathered chin while I, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, waitied for the moment when he would turn and growl and try to kiss my cheek like a rabid dog until Iscreamed and ran out of the bathroom giggling.
All of this I see in an instant when I look down and see my own square hands, so sturdy and strong.
And then I see his hands, swollen and bruised, a blueberry stain on the back where the IV had kept him alive for three more minutes, five more minutes, and then that last and final breath, of death. And then he was gone, living on in the short fingers of my own hands that crack in the winter just like his did.
My father’s hands.
(Note: My father married on June 18, had the first of eight children on June 18, and died on June 18. It was Father’s Day on the day he passed on.)