dudemanflab's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minor changes Today I heard from my mom via text message (who says the world is not in flux?) that my dad and brother removed the dead apricot stumps that had solemnly sat in the back yard for five years. You have to understand that these three cylindrical matters, standing 2.5 feet above the ground, split and desiccated, were fixtures. I once based a login password solely on their existence. I wrote (bad) poetry about them in my sullen years, comparing them to me and my siblings. "We are like forgotten trees!" I accused my parents. But things change. Today my brother used the muscles he has built over the past four years to help lift them from the ground. Dad used a tractor that the Massey's lent us, which would never had been purchased if Steve had not retired. One of my favorite memories from childhood is the suffusion of fruit we had every summer--apricots, peaches, nectarines, and plums out the ears. Mom did most of the work of canning, but I too waded carefully through the lawn, barefoot but avoiding mashed fruit between the toes, as I scanned for ones that were pasty orange and pink. The old woman who lived in the house before us had a period of reclamation at the end of her days. Call it an act of conscience or pleasure, she filled the back yard with over ten fruit trees, honeysuckle, virginia creeper, and irregular bushes. My parents uprooted half of them when we moved in and regularly took out others that threatened the integrity to the foundation and (something I never understood) the patio. My guess is that Dad was looking for an excuse to have a bigger garden. The apricot trees capsized during a windstorm, which had followed a few days of heavy rain. Soil wet and shallow roots, they teetered like drunks and two fell. ("Not deep enough roots! Don't you see?" I had railed in verse). How did I go from the natural event to an overwrought allegorization? Not exactly sure, but part of it had to do with my associating the yard with my dad--his garden, his dogs, hot sweaty summer mornings of pushing the mower only because he said so. But my thoughts toward him changed too. And now I don't see him quite so culpable for the death of fruit trees nor indifferent to our family. He works and plays in his own world, true, but he helps each of us live a little easier in ours. I don't yet know the challenges of being a dad but say he hasn't done to poorly this first time around. 10:05 p.m. - November 09, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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