Letter To My Father

[The night before our Cottage Grove The Nature of Gratitude program on April 28, I realized that Dad had been gone five years this month. Between 2 and 4 a.m. I roamed the dark reaches of my brain condensing and stitching together snippets of old writing with new material to honor Dad’s presence in the world. Most of the day was spent at the computer converting thoughts into bytes and phosphors. By 5 p.m. I was reading the piece to Kim. She said present tense was confusing. Trust is a remarkable thing—I spent another 45 minutes revising the writing into the past. We ate dinner and headed south for the program.

When we arrived at Opal Center I buttonholed Don Latarski, an astonishing jazz guitarist who had just joined our ensemble, and offered to buy him a beer if he would stay on stage and play while I read some writing he had never seen or heard. Yes. Trust really is a remarkable thing. I stumbled a time or two. Yet that impromptu duet of prose and guitar became one of the profound creative experiences of my life. While I wish you could hear the chords and licks behind and between these words, there was no recording. Some things are only a brief swirl in the vast river of time. They become sacred in their transience. As Don likes to say, “it’s all about the flow.”]

***

At 8 a.m. on Memorial Day I rolled up the gravel driveway to the house to help you burn the limbs piled in the pasture. For once, everyone had forgotten but me. Mom was still in her housecoat. You weren’t awake. She wanted to rouse you. I told her it was okay, but she said you’d go on sleeping. She said this as if you might die if she didn’t wake you. You needed an hour and a half to dress and eat some cornflakes that became soggy with the effort. A few caught in your new beard. Shaving had become too much trouble.

You pulled on work boots and a wizened brown hat, then we headed out the back door into the warmth of a blue-egg morning. You had an armload of old newspaper ads and comics to soak up the diesel carried in an open bucket. We crossed a wet band of pasture where May moisture and sunshine had the grass growing all thick and crazy. When you staggered over some deep hoof prints forged in the mud, I told you that if you fell with that diesel it’d take a week to get the smell off.

Heaps of Douglas-fir limbs were in various stages of piling. You pointed me to the windward side of the first slash pile, where I stuffed some newspaper into dry twigs and splashed on some diesel. Mom had given me a book of paper matches. The first flimsy flame was snuffed by the easy breeze before I could place it under the edge of the diesel paper. The second match caught, and a wisp of inky smoke curled upward. The ball of flame spread outward and upward into dead wood. I fed in more limbs, nourishing the fire into a fury of heat that coursed across my face like a personal hell wind. Acrid smoke reeled skyward, drifting toward the neighbor’s place.

You rested on a stump. We chatted.

How well do you know your neighbor?

He’s the one that sets off homemade fireworks.

Oh, that’s right. Then he won’t mind the smoke. Didn’t his wife leave him?

Yeah. I haven’t heard from him in a while, so maybe she’s back.

Maybe you haven’t heard from him in a while because she came back and blew him up.

Your smile was subdued. Everything about you was subdued. I couldn’t tell if you thought the joke was funny. We wandered down the gentle slope of pasture to a small mound of limbs and touched them off. You stared into the fire and told me the truth:

I like to burn. There’s something purifying about it.

You were already leaving.

***

A few years before you left for good, you became obsessed with the Cascadia subduction earthquake. At any moment the jittery edge of northwestern North America could shudder and roll like a shaken rug. That daily dose of adrenaline got you out of bed in the mornings. 

The Big One didn’t happen in your lifetime. Two weeks after you died, the tectonics of seasonal change were in full swing. Late April Sun shouldered away the immovable mass of winter while a half-moon ghost floated in the southeast, washed pale by the tsunami of light streaming across a clear-eyed sky. Bigleaf maple flowers swung in the gentling breeze like small lemon-lime chandeliers. 

I was nearly out of coffee. No one wants me to run out of coffee. Not even you. I bought ten pounds from a roaster nestled beneath Interstate 5 on a hill above Glenwood. With packages safely stowed in the back seat, I drove toward downtown Springfield, my nasal passages brimful with the smell of freshly roasted beans.

There was one more errand on the way to your house. The pleasant young woman at the funeral home knew me and told me I went to high school with her aunt and uncle. She laughed and said her aunt had stalked me online. Then she disappeared into the back and returned with a small shopping bag. Inside was a cardboard container with a quarter-sized metal tag: 834674. I signed a form, handed her a photo ID that she ignored. The bag was surprisingly heavy, this concentrated density of your new presence in the physical world. I carried your ashes into the surging sunshine and placed them in the back seat next to the coffee beans. The parcels were similar in size. When I arrived at the house, Mom had me set the container in the mud room on a counter next to the back door. 

I changed into work clothes. Opened a cold beer. Headed out to the garage to continue overhauling the utility trailer you built when I was ten, then gave me when I moved away for graduate school. Even though the trailer had been rebuilt multiple times, it was in a state of desperate dilapidation. The final insult happened the day before you landed in the hospital for the last time. I knocked off a fender trying to chuck a heavy round of firewood into the box. That morning in the emergency room I told you about the fender. You forced a small smile and a barely audible Oh yeah? Those were your last living words to me, that laconic acknowledgment that the trailer needed attention. I promised I’d pack the wheel bearings with fresh grease when I rebuilt the box. Freshly greased bearings spin more freely.

On most days, gratitude for your life has kept me spinning freely. My grieving isn’t heavy. Yet even in the liquid sunshine of an April afternoon there is a small resistance, the persistent weight of loss that holds me back a little, like a long climb up a gentle hill. Grief is the slow grinding of land masses sliding across themselves, punctuated by unpredictable tremors. It is never the Big One.

***

Your grandson Tanner busted his ass to get the old black pickup running in time. The morning after your Memorial Weekend celebration we put Mom into the cab. Tanner drove her up the new road onto a bench above the home place you always called The Flat, an ancient terrace cut by the McKenzie River that now coils through leafing cottonwoods on the valley floor a thousand feet below. Your sons and grandchildren followed the pickup on foot. You always loved the view, always wanted to build a house up there.

Near the top, we all jumped into the back to give the rear more weight for the final pull. Everyone piled out and gathered around. I handed each person a blue plastic scoop that Mom had collected from boxes of laundry detergent. We wandered off with a serving of ashy grit and our thoughts. I ditched my scoop and carried you against the skin of my hands, just to feel your rough palms one more time. I honored your ever-expanding life by placing you with as many tree species as possible: Douglas-fir, alder, hemlock, and bigleaf maple. At a small pond, I offered you to breeding rough-skinned newts and red-legged frogs.

I’m not well-versed in the lore of souls and the afterlife. I only knew that elemental carbon and nitrogen, calcium and magnesium, potassium and phosphorus would dissolve in winter rains, percolate downward, and feed the upward press of trees. What the trees didn’t use would move deeper, find its way into water seeping across the pasture below, held at the surface by an impenetrable layer of clay, making mud that sucks at the rubber boots of kids. Traces of you would go deeper still, into an aquifer feeding the well that waters the old house.

***

The rains have come and gone five times since you left. When the well pump was dying, I liked to think your molecules were whispering encouragement to it from water 165 feet down. We had to replace the pump anyway. I’ve had to fix stuff I’ve never fixed before: gray water line, sewer line, and rotten bathroom floor. I laughed when I discovered your patched-together shortcuts and joked that everything had lasted only long enough to get you out of here. The house misses you. I miss you, too. Everything is breaking.

Mom now lives with your son in eastern Oregon. When I visited her a few weeks ago, we went to town for burgers and fries. She handed me her leftover fries and started asking after you. 

Have you heard from your Dad?

No Mom, he’s been gone for five years.

Well, where’d he go? I’m a little miffed he hasn’t been in touch.

She misses you in the mysterious ways of a failing brain. I didn’t know what to say next. I was grateful my mouth was full of fries.

Back at the home place, spring the rains hung heavy in the valley like they did when I was a kid. Cailleach, Gaelic goddess of winter, has held the season of rebirth within her gray womb the way a blacktail doe clings to her unborn fawn, swollen belly not ready to relinquish the change of seasons. Only recently has Sun broken through the winter density of rain clouds. Tendrils of mist shook free from the greening ridge above the house to rise and die in newborn warmth.

Your grandson and great-grandsons are living in your house. The boys have lost rubber boots in sticky pasture mud. They play on your old bulldozer at the barn, hike the road to The Flat where your ashes have dissolved into larger cycles of water and trees.

You have become the late-waking bigleaf maple with leaves unfurling like the hands of babies, chandelier blossoms dangling anew. Honeybees flock to the lemony flowers, fill their crops with nectar, grateful for spring food and new work.

Maple honey is like no other. Thick. Resinous. Sweet.