Better Together, by Diane Nelson

Yesterday, I transplanted pumpkins that were shooting vines all over our spare bedroom along with some leggy broccoli, and so I naturally thought of Dad. All it took was a sniff of seed starting soil mixed with the musty, decomposing stench of Plant-Tone. I caught a whiff as I carefully carried the two trays of seedlings down the steep, cellar steps. My brain flashed to all of the times I helped dad transplant tomato seedlings and his white Styrofoam cups with the bottoms cut-off.
When Dad died in the winter of 1995, we decided to buy the house in Bellingham from Ma because she could not care for the acre property by herself. The change of seasons in Massachusetts is a night terror for the elderly. If you aren’t mowing your lawn once a week you are shoveling feet of snow and raking mountains of leaves. It never ends, and Ma wasn’t interested in that. After two years of caring for Dad during his battle with congestive heart failure, and forty years of raising six kids practically by herself, she was ready for a rest. I understood completely. She deserved it. Ma found a condo in the south part of town, and I saw it as an investment toward the future home I would find that would be perfect for me. Fifteen years later, I am still in Bellingham and every year I put tomatoes and other things in the same ground my dad did when he lived here. We’ve stayed for many reasons, but I have just as many for wanting to leave. Those same bitchy seasons are a huge factor in the face of your average arthritis sufferer.
I learned everything I know about gardening from my dad and so I naturally started my own little plot the summer we moved in. I made it larger and tried new things each year. I added fruit bushes and grape vines, just like Dad had. I started making and canning pickles and jams, and it just became part of my life, something I love to do. I had successes, I also had failures, but dad was an artist with plants. He could coax a juicy pepper from the most downcast of plants, deeply shocked by an early frost, like no one I’ve ever seen on the Home and Garden channel. His roses were exquisite, though he never used chemicals or pesticides to enhance his plants. He composted our scraps and the grass clippings before it was popular to be organic. He hand-picked the weeds instead of using Round-Up. Imagine that! I gardened organically by his example, not because it was cool to do so, and I got made-fun of a lot at first by the same people who are now buying organic food at the local Whole Foods Market. Our neighbors still used chemicals on both sides of our house and across the street so my garden was probably getting soaked with noxious pesticides brought in with the wind anyway, but at least I took care with my little piece of the earth and that’s all that mattered to me.
When I clicked the lights on in the cellar yesterday, I breathed in deeply with my nose and smelled Dad. He practically lived in the basement when he was home. Way before the “man-cave” my dad had a little place to himself down there, complete with beer fridge.
When we first moved here, I used to think I smelled roses and cigarettes sometimes when I was down in the basement alone. Pain mixed with anger floated through my consciousness. It wasn’t the first time I had thoughts that maybe living here would bring back too many bad memories. After all, I knew I was probably the only kid at school with arthritis, but I definitely wasn’t the only one with a dad who drank too much, was I? Some of the feelings that I had were very raw.
I spent a lot of time with my dad between the ages of four and twelve. Ma had five older kids, the three boys were in sports, and if she wasn’t trapped under a mound of laundry, she was driving five or six kids back and forth to the baseball field or basketball practice. I often ask her now how she managed to do anything else but laundry. I have one-third of the kids she had and I am always throwing a load in, it seems. Especially during softball and basketball seasons. She laughs and says she blocked it all out. That always makes me smile, even though it should make me sad. My poor mother.
By the time I was eight, I’d already been in the hospital twice for infections and it seemed as if I had one illness after another before I was finally diagnosed around the age of twelve with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. It explained a lot of mysterious aches and pains that I always seemed to complain about, as well as the hot, swollen joints where I had the worst eczema. I spent the whole of my elementary school years miserable with itchy rashes, stiff joints that seemed to hurt deeply into the bone. I had random, unexplained pain without a clear-cut diagnosis as to what was going on. I was on and off prednisone for five or six years, then a really bad viral infection took hold of my little body and the arthritis hit full flare. I didn’t know what was going on but my limbs were not doing what I told them to do anymore and the pain was ridiculous.
But before all that, when I was considered normal, my diagnosis was simply “severe eczema,” and I suffered badly as a small child.
To distract me, and to get me out of Ma’s hair for a while on Saturday mornings, Dad took me on his errands and then food shopping at Fernandes in Medway. On the way home, he would stop at “the club” to drink a couple of beers and bring me in with him while the food sat in paper bags in the back of the station wagon. But not for too long so that Ma would get mad.
I sifted the white sand from the shuffle board table through my fingertips. Then I fiddled around with the piano. I only knew one song. Chopsticks. The deer head mounted on the wall watched me all the while. Its eyes followed me, no matter which side of the room I was on and it freaked me out.
I stuffed more and more pieces of Juicy Fruit gum into my mouth. Dad bought me that at the store. He knew it didn’t matter. Ma would never find-out because it would be gone before we got home. I liked to shove two, even three, pieces of the gum into my mouth at once, and since it got rubbery and tasteless after only a little while, I had to re-load often. The problem with Juicy Fruit, for me, was that I wanted to have a fresh piece in my mouth at all times. I wasn’t supposed to have gum. My teeth were rotten because of all the Prednisone. When you looked at pictures of me, from year to year, you could tell when I was on the steroids and when I was not. When I was, I was a puffy, bloated fish, who looked as if she could float. When I was not, I looked thin and deflated. I always looked tired.
I wonder if that’s because I was a terrible eater. Everyone laughs now at the appetites my kids have, that they eat like men and try everything. I was not like that at all. Picky beyond picky, I never tried anything new. I also had food allergies so it was daunting to try a strange fruit or nut without a little fear attached. My brothers and sisters made fun of me and acted like I was faking it because I didn’t like peas, but was I faking the huge hives on my lips? No one bothered to look that closely.
When Dad and his friends laughed loudly at the bar, I glanced over at them but no one was looking at me. Dad never said it outright, but I knew, even as young as six, not to let-on to Ma that we’d been to the club. I never had to because she always knew, without me telling her, anyway.
I climbed up onto a big bar stool and ordered a Coke from the fountain, and a bag of Wise potato chips, the forbidden fruit.
“Charlie, that’s my baby,” Dad said, proudly, and rubbed his stinky, tobacco stained fingers down the mane of my white-blonde hair.
“Cute little girl, Whitey,” this guy said in my direction. He had a crooked-toothed smile hiding beneath a huge, swollen, pink nose. I watched a purple vein quivering on the bridge of it, running toward his right nostril.
I knew I would pay later for having potato chips. My itchy, swollen limbs, and a nervous feeling of guilt, would overcome me when I got home, but at the moment, I was looking for a place to put my gum for later.
When I was done with my Coke and Dad was done with his beer, we went home.
Ma said, “Did you get bananas?”
But then she saw me.
“Hon, you didn’t let her eat potato chips again, did you?”
The evidence was all over my face, the red, blotches and scratches I couldn’t help but make on the drive home. It itched so badly. She was mad, too, because she could tell Dad was buzzed. As much as he always told her how stupid she was all the time, I learned pretty fast how smart Ma really was.
“You’re getting an Aveeno bath tonight, Lady Jane.” She grabbed my arms a little roughly and spread them out so she could see. I had scratched them both bloody. Time with Dad was worth it, though. Every second. He treated me as an equal, never talking down to me, and he let me have whatever I wanted. I was his baby. He said it all the time.
Ma rubbed shiny ointment all over my skin that night, then pulled my brother’s long, white tube socks up over my hands and arms. They were supposed to keep me from scratching, but I always managed to rip them off during one of my powerful dreams and the next morning there’d be dried blood all over me from where I’d scratched.
Ma tucked me into bed and kissed me twice on the lips.
“Now say your prayers and go to sleep,” she said, before shutting the door half-way. I rolled over onto my side.
The next day was Sunday and Dad cooked us breakfast to loud Polka music before we went to church. Dad loved Polka music and was quite a dancer, even though he was Russian, not Polish.
I always had “bubbles,” on Sundays, my name for eggs, sunny-side-up. Dad made us big glasses of chocolate milk, toast, and fried, plank potatoes, salted to perfection. My brother and I would sit on the floor in the parlor in front of the long, coffee table, eat, and watch cartoons. Dad wasn’t part of our church, so he worked in his garden while we were gone, and prepared a big Sunday meal. It was usually something like pork roast which I didn’t like. I put a Chinese jump rope around the legs of two dining room chairs and played by myself while I waited for everyone else to be ready to leave for church.
“In, out, side to side, step, in, out.”
Dad was peeling potatoes.
“Quit jumping around in here,” Dad yelled and he snapped off the radio and headed for the cellar. I didn’t like the way my name sounded in Dad’s mouth when he was angry. It made me feel stupid and queasy. I threw my jump rope into my drawer in the kitchen where I kept all my stuff. Ma called it junk. My brother’s junk drawer was right above mine.
After church, I changed into jeans and a T shirt and went outside in the back yard with my baton. When I saw Dad sitting at the picnic table drinking a beer. I ditched my baton and asked him to play me in gin rummy.
I sat down across from him after I’d fetched the cards and a little tin can and set them both on the table between us. Ma kept pennies in the can and left it on the kitchen counter. It had felt flowers pasted all around it and when anyone had extra pennies in their pocket, they dropped them in the can. It was a gift from my older brother, who picked it up at one of those shopping sprees at school. The library was a store that day, and each period a different class went in and kids could buy Christmas gifts for their parents and siblings. There were long tables with cheap arts and crafts littered on them. A cash box sat before the mom volunteer and we took our crumbled dollars from our pockets to pay for the junk we chose as gifts. My kids go to my old elementary school and they still have the shopping spree but it’s a lot nicer now with better gifts. My kids love it.
“I got Gin, Bum.” Dad said his nickname for me without thinking about it. He had the same nickname for all three of us girls and stopped using it as soon as that girl was wearing a bra. As usual, Dad flipped his last card onto the table, face down. I watched his Adam’s apple slide up and down on his tanned neck as he polished off the rest of his beer in three long gulps. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and swept all the pennies toward him. I felt jilted but at the same time I was fine with it because Dad never let me win, he didn’t patronize.
“Let’s play again,” I cried, but Dad said it was almost time to eat so I retrieved my baton from where I’d thrown it earlier. I twirled it around for a while, making up a little dance routine with it. I then watched Dad mope through his garden. He admired his growing, rich, fern of asparagus, then clomped down the aisle toward his bushy green bean plants. I made-up more moves for my dance routine with my baton until Ma called us through the back porch window.
I washed my hands and sat at my seat at the dining room table, on the left side of Ma. I was the only one there, and I pretended that it was just me, Mom and Dad in my family, instead of me and five other kids. I imagined I was the only kid, and when my parents sat down to eat, it would be just the three of us, talking about what we had done that day and passing the gravy or mashed potatoes only to each other.
Instead, my sister sat down to my left, then Dad at the head of the table, then my three older brothers elbowed each other down the other side, to my mom’s right. The table had two leaves, which were always needed when everyone was there but my oldest sister didn’t make it home much unless it was a holiday, and even then she didn’t stay over anymore. After she went to college in western Mass, she got a job in Boston and her own apartment with a few of her friends.
After dinner, when Ma started to clean the dishes, I was still sitting there trying to finish, by myself as usual, always the last one done. My stomach churned, as it often did when I was on Prednisone, and I had a hard time getting anything down. I’d finished my mashed potatoes, though, so that should have been good enough.
Dad finally had mercy on me and told me to go get some Styrofoam cups from the cupboard. I did, and he carried two long trays at a time through the kitchen, taking the seedlings from the parlor to the porch. Ma had already made my plate disappear.
We had a table in the parlor under the back window. It got a lot of sun in the afternoon so Dad kept his tomato and pepper seedlings on it before it was time to plant them outside. He planted seeds in plastic pots back in March, in sets of six, then moved them to bigger pots in April. Then in May, he kept putting them outside for a while every day when the weather started to warm. In early June, it was time to set them out, for they were finally ready.
“It’s called hardening them off,” Dad said as he carefully put the plants down on the porch floor. We used to have a black and white TV out there on the porch, sitting on top of the little fridge with the Busch Beer sticker on the front. Dad watched the Red Sox on it sometimes if we wanted to watch Happy Days or Laverne and Shirley in the parlor, but my sister took the little TV with her saying she had bought it, so now Dad watches the Sox in the parlor, even if we want to watch something else.
I looked at his tall, leafy plants. They all had thick stalks, some even had produced a tiny, yellow flower or two, and I suddenly felt their need to go and take root in Dad’s composted haven outside. Their stalks were thick, and the deep, green leaves on each were beautiful. I loved to smell the tomato seedlings. It always reminded me of Dad.
“And that’s what we’re going to do today.”
Dad had been talking, but I wasn’t listening. I was concentrating on his thick, tan hands, gently handling the seedlings. I helped him get them all out to the garden. The soil smelled right, and I lifted the earth into my hands, feeling its silky smoothness. I was entranced with this special place created by Dad.
“This will help stabilize them until I get them staked-up,” he said of the Styrofoam cups, “and none of those pesky worms can get to them either.” He let out a choked laugh, then reached into the pocket of his T shirt for his Camels. When he lit one, I watched the red tip glow when he sucked in. He saw me watching him and stared into my eyes for a while. Then he turned and grabbed his shovel. With each little hole he dug, I laid a little seedling in, pushing the loam around it, as if tucking it in for the night. Dad carefully placed the Styrofoam cup around the plant’s base.
“Good night. Good night. Say your prayers and go to sleep!” I said to each one and my dad snickered at me but said nothing.
He was breathing a little heavy and lines of sweat were running loosely down the sides of his neck. He took his white handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped the sweat off. He blew his nose with it, folded it back up, and put it back in his pocket. I shuddered. Gross. I hated handkerchiefs. I wanted to buy cute boxes of Kleenex but my mother said they were too expensive and you just threw them away. I told her that you would save on time, water and detergent from not having to wash them every week and she told me to shut up. Maybe she had a point.
I looked at the bulging pocket of Dad’s T shirt, thinking he was smoking too many cigarettes, but you couldn’t talk to Dad about stuff like that. He would say you didn’t know what you were talking about. Sometimes I agreed with him, but sometimes I didn’t. He didn’t like it when I didn’t. He would say I was starting to act smart like my sisters and I knew what was at the end of that road. Nothing.
By the time Dad and I finished transplanting two rows of tomatoes and two rows of peppers, the knees of my jeans were soggy and stained with mud. I was hoping Ma wouldn’t be mad. The sun was starting to set way down the end of our street behind the trees. It was glowing red, just like Dad’s cigarette. The smell of his smoke competed with the aroma of Ma’s famous Nestles Toll House chocolate chip cookies, which were considered a creation around these parts. Ma made the best cookies in town, and everyone knew it. I didn’t like them. I never really cared for sweets. I liked potato chips and I couldn’t have them. I especially loved Wise potato chips. They were so salty my lips would chap and sting when I ate them. I loved that.
Later, Dad sat out back, on the picnic table. He did that a lot in the evening, shoving the charcoal grill off to one side so he could have an unobstructed view. He stared out at his garden and beyond into the woods, maybe thinking about all those rabbits, and other creatures, who wanted his vegetables as much as he did. Maybe the picnic table was where Dad did a lot of thinking. I know that’s where he did a lot of smoking. He’d sit there and sip beer under his luscious grapevine that grew on a huge trellis above his head. Sometimes he laid down right there on the bench and took a nap. Ma would laugh a little, but more often than not, she’d click her tongue in disgust. I was just glad he wasn’t “taking a nap” on the couch on the porch, since all of my friends would see him if they came over. There was a small chance they wouldn’t notice him out back on the picnic table, at least. Pretty soon, I stopped inviting them over after a while. The turbulence was too unpredictable.
The grapevine was half red, half white, but I called them green because that’s what they looked like. They were infested with Japanese beetles. Dad didn’t seem to mind them. He used a milky mixture he created himself to control them and he sprayed them every year so that the leaves would stain white but the grapes would flourish. The beetles never went away, though, and Dad shared with them very nicely. If one happened to escape then it would face cruel and unusual punishment at its finest by my middle brother.
He was a skinny kid, but tougher than the foundation of our seven room Garrison Colonial. He had light brown hair that sweetened to blond in the summer and hazy, auburn colored eyes that blazed in the sunlight, his choice of weapon to torture his subjects. His eerie, evil smile began at the corner of his lips, and snuck all the way to his cheeks by the time he was finished with the beetles.
He held his pocket magnifying glass above the poor things’ heads and watched them with tremendous glee, burning alive in his marmalade eyes, their wings fluttering as they tried to flee, but the magnifying glass followed them down the path of the picnic table. When he was done with one, he found another and pushed it under his magnifying glass, demonizing the sun to subject his prisoners to a slow, burning death. Soon, they were nothing but dust on the Quikcrete. As he finished, he swept their remains off the table, done with his work.
He used the stove to burn some of his army men once. He had a thing for fire. It was kind of sick though, the way he made one soldier headless, another one arm or legless. He lit the gas on the stove and held them over it using Dad’s photography tongs. I could almost hear them screaming, squealing in pain, like the lobsters Dad threw in a boiling pot of water to cook them. Ma had plenty of stories about her middle son, and his “curiosity.” Like when he lit a fire in the woods when he was a little kid. And when he did it again the fire department chief showed up to have a talk with him.
His grades were stellar, though, and he was a great athlete so my parents gave him a pass every now and then. He went off to college, too, eventually. Everyone left eventually and I felt sad and lonely, but wasn’t that what I wanted? To be alone with my parents? I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea any more.
That night, after I took an Aveeno bath, we watched the Lawrence Welk Show, and I sat on Dad’s lap in the big chair before the TV. I had on pink and white feet pajamas and Dad was stroking my long, blonde hair. His fingers smelled like cigarettes and his breath was full of beer, but that wasn’t all. He was tanned, happy and young. The way I wish I remembered him.
After Lawrence Welk, the Wonderful World of Disney came on. We all loved that show. Mom sat sideways on the couch with her feet up, my brother on the end, and me and Dad in the chair. When it was over, it was time for bed. Ma read Dr. Seuss’ “The Sleep Book” to me and my brother then tucked us in tight. “Say your prayers and go to sleep,” she always said.
I heard Dad take-off in his long, black car minutes later and he wasn’t back until late. While I waited for him to come home from the bar, I rolled over onto my side, trying to force myself to sleep by rocking and counting to one hundred, then starting over again if I wasn’t asleep, yet. I wondered if all Dads went out with their friends on the weekend instead of settling down on the couch to watch Marcus Welby with their wives? I wondered if their wives even wanted them to? Maybe they liked having some alone time after all of the chaos.
I wasn’t asleep yet, and it occurred to me that rather than counting, I should say my prayers, since I was getting so distracted by my thoughts that I had to keep starting over again. So I said the “Our Father,” then “Hail Mary,” followed by “Glory Be,” and finally, “An Act of Contrition.” I said them over and over until I lost track of which one I was saying. I reverted back to counting, but never fell asleep.
I craned my ears to hear Dad walk through the porch door. Was he drunk?
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he muttered, a little loud, or maybe that was because it was deep into the night, and everything was still, except for the low drone of the TV. Ma always waited up for him. For everyone.
I heard his belt come off, change jingling in his pockets, as he took off his pants downstairs in the hallway where he kept his clothes in the closet. Maybe that was for a quick escape? It didn’t seem odd to me then, but it made Ma mad because he was always walking around with no clothes on.
“I have clothes on,” he yelled suddenly and I jumped. I heard my brother snort in his sleep. Dad wore really thin boxer shorts. And whenever he was walking around with them on and nothing else, I had this fear of the census lady showing up or the Boy Scouts with their box full of stuff to sell.
I wondered if Ma said something else to get him mad after that, something like, “Are you drunk?” Because he was yelling more loudly now and banging cupboards and drawers. He never hit anybody but the boys, sometimes, so I guess we should have been thankful. One time Dad put his hand right through the cellar door, he was so mad! He broke his arm that day and Ma wouldn’t take him to the hospital so he drove himself and came home with a cast and a sling.
That memory, and what was going on downstairs set my heart beating fast, and I felt as though it were me being blamed for coming home late, stinking of beer, a little vodka, maybe, and yucky cigarettes. In the winter, Ma made Dad hang his coat outside on the porch because it stunk so badly from the bar.
He labored up the steps, still muttering to himself, got into bed, and started snoring loudly. I finally drifted off to sleep.
Dad was up early the next morning for work, as usual. He never skipped a day, despite his condition the night before. He was always gone before we got up. It awed me, how he could be out all night and sounded like he was going to cough out his liver the next morning, but he’d never stay home. It wasn’t too hard to figure out. Why stick around here and listen to Ma all day, and how it was your own damned fault?
Ma fixed me some Count Chocula cereal and pretended nothing was wrong. I heard her go down to the cellar as I was heading outside. That’s where she always cried. Me, I needed to cry somewhere comfortable, like in bed, with my blankie wrapped around my neck for solace. I would never be able to get comfortable in the cellar, where the scary woodpile was, and where I always found myself in my nightmares. I didn’t like it down there, still don’t, but I guess Ma did. She never cried in front of anyone. Besides, she did the wash at the same time. I wanted to follow her. I liked to rock on Prince, my rocking horse, while she did the wash. Something told me not to go that day, though.
I stayed outside until lunch time. I had a grilled cheese, a ring ding and some Kool-Aid like I did every day. I stepped quietly around Ma, testing her mood. Later on, I watched the Flintstones and the Brady Bunch on TV, Dad got home, and we ate supper.
We were having chicken with potatoes and carrots. I was a meat and potatoes girl and didn’t have any desire to taste the fresh asparagus or tomatoes Dad grew in his garden. Everyone else seemed to enjoy them, so let them! I didn’t like vegetables, except green beans and potatoes.
“Go get me a beer, Bum,” Dad called to me. He was home early, so I gladly ran to the cellar for him. Ma wouldn’t let him keep his beer in the fridge upstairs. He didn’t seem to mind, though, he still came home with a case every Friday night and two boxes of pizzas from the Greek’s up the street. I guess it made him happy.
The cellar was cold, and as I opened the fridge door, I shuddered, not just from that, but because of the wood stacked neatly behind me. I hated that woodpile. I had a recurring nightmare that someone was chasing me down the cellar stairs, and as I turned the corner to hide behind the woodpile, I saw Dad and it scared me. I would wake up screaming and my sister would yell at me to shut up.
I hated to go down cellar. I guess that’s why Ma made me go down there when I was bad. I would cry and scream to be let out, holding onto the door handle in terror, waiting for the cellar ghost to get me.
That wasn’t the only recurring dream I had when I was between six and ten years old, either. I also used to dream, all the time, that I was running from the house across the street to my own, but in super-slow motion. I couldn’t get my legs to move any faster, and as I looked down the street, I saw a yellow taxi cab coming at me full speed, obviously going to hit me. I would then, for some reason, bend down on the street, crouch, and wait to be hit with my eyes squeezed shut. I always did have vivid dreams. In techno-color. I wonder if that was from the Prednisone?
Dad had a few more beers and next thing you know, he and Ma were having another fight. My brother and I ran upstairs and shut the door to the bedroom he shared with our two older brothers.
I whispered to him to turn on a light. It was dark and stuffy in there. He laid down on his bed with his face toward the wall, away from me. I didn’t know how he could use such a harsh, dry blanket like the pea green one on his bed. It had belonged to one of our older brothers and had thick pills of fabric all over it. I used to fall asleep on them once in a while when the boys were home, listening to the Beatles on the Hi-Fi in their bedroom while they played cards. I would fall into a kaleidoscope dream and I always woke up with a scratchy design on my cheek that itched.
“I hate him.” my brother said quietly. I stared at his small back, at the shape of his head, the same one his son now possesses.
I wanted to feel the same way. I wanted him to know I was loyal to him, the one whom I knew instinctively would always be there for me, no matter what. Dad? Everyone knew he couldn’t be relied on. We just didn’t know that would be because he was dead, not just down at the club.
“Me, too,” I said, not really sure if I did, or not.
I got really sick a few years after that weekend and I never got better. I didn’t really think much about Dad’s drinking after that, since I was busy trying to find out what was wrong with me, testing one thing after another, seeing a slew of doctors. I had enough to think about just getting up and through each day and even though I was right about my brother, he was always there for me when I needed him, I was surprised to find my dad right there for me as well. If he was working the three to eleven shift at GM, for example, he’d show up at lunchtime when Ma was at work and cook me something to eat, or watch TV with me and I’d feel less alone during the day. Even though my arthritis was a difficult challenge for me, it was also a heartbreaking reality for my parents, something I didn’t really get until I became a mother myself. Having my kids gave me a whole new perspective on my arthritis, and on my father, so if anything positive came out of this dreadful disease, I choose to take that away from it. I saw him as a different person than the rest of the kids did. He showed me that he was more than just an absent father, a selfish alcoholic. He was also the father of a very sick little girl and that often took precedence over his own wants and needs. I saw him and my mother become a team to help me battle my arthritis and my opinion of him was formed, or transformed, after that dreadful diagnosis. Sometimes out of darkness comes light. There was no doubt that my arthritis brought my parents closer together, too.
After Dad died and I moved back into his house with my husband, I looked around and realized that it wasn’t just his body that had shriveled away. His rose bushes didn’t exist anymore. Where the garden was, a wide expanse of grass grew. The compost pile was down and gone. No asparagus bush swayed in the wind. The grapevines seemed to have disappeared into the earth. It was up to me to recreate all of that, or start anew, and I have to say, in the fifteen years we’ve been here, I’ve watched my gardens flourish right along with my children and I think of Dad with pleasant memories and fondness instead of with anger and sadness. It’s just better for me that way.