For as long as I can remember, every few days from spring
until deep in the fall, Dad would bring home a bouquet for the cut glass vase
on the dining room table. Every year, he would start with the first pussy
willow buds that he could find and follow them with forsythia, daffodils, apple
blossoms, and lilacs.
Not content with just wildflowers, Dad planted a huge flower
garden every year. This garden sat along the driveway fence and extended from
the sidewalk to the orchard fence. I’ve never thought about it until now, but
Dad’s flowers greeted everyone who walked into the yard. My father may not have
been articulate in any conventional sense, but there was beautiful poetry and lovely
lyrics in the work of his hands.
It has been nearly 60 years since he planted that flower
garden for the last time, and if I ever knew the various types of flowers that
he planted, I’ve forgotten them by now. All I know is that he had flowers
blooming and available for cutting from spring through fall. After the
early-season wildflowers, there were flowers to cut for the dining room table
until the killing frosts in November.
It’s funny how our understanding of things changes with the
passing of time. As a child, I thought the flowers on the table were just a
normal thing in our house. When I was a younger man, I remembered them as being
a curious peculiarity of my father’s quirky personality. At this point, deep in
the late innings of this game, I realize now that flowers on the table were a
deep, profound statement of my father’s love and commitment to my mother. The
flowers were always there, no matter what was going on in his life.
There were times when Mother’s health created awful stress
in our home. Farming is never easy, and there were days – hell, whole seasons –
when it was all that Dad could do to drag crops out of that red clay soil, and
get healthy hogs to market; times when the rain wouldn’t come or when the rain
wouldn’t stop. There were summers when the boattailed blackbird swarms covered
the whole of the sky for an hour or more as they flew over, and could destroy
an entire 80 acres of corn in a single day. Dad’s life was not always easy, but
no matter what was going on, what difficulties Dad was dealing with, there were
always fresh-cut flowers on the table for Mom.
I have had countless hours alone over the years to think and contemplate on things, both seen and unseen. Those flowers continue to surface in my thoughts. I am awed by what Dad did to make sure that Mom had her flowers. It wasn’t that she ever asked for them – it was just my father’s expression of devotion. Although “Heartache and sorrow and sadness unendingly find, Wings on a memory”2, the memory of the flowers on the table seems to override all the darker memories.
Of all the gifts that my father gave me, the memory of the
flowers might be one of the best.
The second memory of my father that always comes to mind is
the single teardrop that ran down his cheek for the last 20 years of his life.
When Dad was about 60 years old, he blew his nose one day and ruptured a tear
duct in his left eye. For the rest of his life, that tear duct leaked, and
there was always, constantly, a single tear running slowly down his left cheek.
Just one tear, and as it would finally drip off his chin, another single tear
would begin working its way down his cheek.
Dad had worked all his life outdoors. His face was a
weathered, almost walnut colored shade of brown. His prominent cheekbones gave
his cheeks a rather hollowed look. He had expressive, brown eyes. The years of
hard work, being outdoors, and life’s stresses left his face deeply lined. Not all
the lines and wrinkles recorded hardship. No, many of them were laugh lines,
and the deep crows' feet at the corners of his eyes marked a lifetime of smiles
and laughter; marks of a man who was comfortable with himself.
When I remember that single tear, my mind does not
necessarily jump to the hard and troubled times of Dad’s life; “for not all
tears are an evil.”3 it is just as easy for me to remember the times
when Dad did not struggle as to dwell on the hard times. He was a good man who
lived by a simple code. He loved his family in his own inarticulate, maybe
turbulent way. He always did the best that he could do with what he had. He
tried to set a good example for his children. No, not all tears are evil.
These, then, are the first 2
things that come to mind when I think of my father: fresh-cut flowers on the
dining room table and a single tear on his brown and weathered cheek. From
where I am, with much more behind me than ahead of me, I think that these are
wonderful images to ride with, down the last of the years.
Footnotes:
1.
Ian
Tyson, “Alcohol in the Bloodstream”, “Eighteen Inches of Rain”, 1994
Mickey
Newberry, "Angeline", recorded by Joan Baez, “Blessed Are...”, 1971
J.R.R.
Tolkien, “The Lord of the Rings”, published by George Allen and
Unwin (UK), Houghton Mifflin (US), 1954
