Ten years ago today, my father died in the local hospital after living for over ten years with COPD. He and Mom were four days out from their 49th anniversary—I was 15 away from turning 40. I took care of them both as they aged. I never married, I didn’t date, I worked rarely in the public workplace and instead did my jewelrymaking in my home studio. In exchange for my attention and care, my folks let me live in the little shack on their weekend property rent-free and even provided me with an allowance—in the old days they called this a "remittance."
I took care of their weekend place and saw to it that nobody trespassed and that their pipes didn’t freeze in the winter. When they came home for Christmas I had already decorated the house, and after the holidays I took the stuff down after they went back to Cheyenne. Dad and I planted hundreds of bulbs which the gophers always ate, and we fed the plentiful whitetails bushels of apples in the fall and corn in winter when the snow got too deep. Mom and I havested wild asparagus in the woods and played gin in the evenings in front of the kitchen window as we watched raccoons raid the feeders. Mom and Dad loved coming home as much as I loved having them here. It was in most ways an idyllic life, and I miss them both terribly.
On these June days though, when the cotton is flying in the wind and the fragrance of Russian olive fills the air, I miss Dad the most. From him I aquired the will, if not the skill, to garden. His gardens back in town were beautiful. He made roses come to Jesus. His glads were the tallest I’d ever stood next to. His irises made the ladies of the garden club jealous. His lovingly planted rows of red salvias bordered the lower garden beds, followed by eschelons of snapdragons, mums, dahlias and cannas. His palate was always colorful, mostly hot—wild reds, shocking pinks, sunset oranges—so subsequently our yard was alive with all manner of flower-loving insects. We had enormous bumblebees, lots of mason’s and honeybees, and hummingbird hawk moths in the evenings. These hovering, powdery creatures resemble hummingbirds very closely and they love petunias most of all. Mourning Cloak and Tiger Swallowtail butterflies were very common. Overhead we could see and hear the nighthawks hunt in the evening sky. When his gardening day was done, Dad would sit on the porch with a glass of iced coffee and smoke a cigarette, finally flicking the still-burning butt out into the damp grass to be extinguished by the sprinkler. He was non-symptomatic when he quit smoking in 1973, two years after he bought the property I live on with his grace. It took 15 more years for his lungs to show the signs of irreversible disease. During that time he hiked, fished, daypacked and took thousands of images of his beloved wildflowers, always hoping he had escaped 30-some years of damage.
On these June days I sit on my own porch. The old flatcar shack is bigger now—Dad saw to it that I had a snug home after all. I have just planted tomatoes and potsful of other things that delight me—ultramarine lobelia, creamy yellow petunias, black-eyed susan vines, tri-colored sage. My palate runs cool. Here in the country there isn’t much reason to waste water on glads or roses, and the perennials I do have in the raised beds are tough and tried. Neither the deer nor the gophers nor the turkeys seem to like any of it. Bareroot trees are soaking in seaweed tea to ready them for planting. I’ll wait until the heat subsides to do that. A redwinged blackbird trills in the Russian olive. Time and the seasons move forward. But I sometimes sense a slight hesitation in the wind, or a questioning in the way a swallow flies. The land remembers Dad just as I do. His boots made paths along the river that still show signs of him having been there. Antlers and brightly painted hip blades of cows are still nailed to the barn wall where he would photograph them on winter days when he liked the light. Perhaps the owls are decendants of the ones whose images he took when they were still nothing more than weightless puffballs newly freed of the nest. They seem familiar and friendly to me and mine. At night when they call to each other in the quiet starlight, I can almost hear my Dad’s voice—"Hey Ann! Why are you sleeping? Come out and see the moonlight on the river. The Russian olives are blooming, and the garden is awake and alive."
God I miss you, Pop.