Memories

Day 29: I had but a few years to enjoy my father's stories, to watch him in his woodshop or to help him in the garden as he sowed corn or turned the compost; a few short years before the effects of war wrested him away. My memories of him are few and perhaps colored by the fact that he was viewed through adoring eyes. I am certain that he must have been a man with faults, but my recollections find none. I never heard him raise his voice in anger except to swear at the tractor or a raiding neighborhood dog, never heard him argue with my mother, except in the sport of philosophical debate. Nor do I recall his illness, because he masked it well. What comes to mind most readily when I think of my father is sunny, warm days and corn sheaves, the scents of sawdust and Old Spice, and the rich browns he always wore and how they accented his dark eyes. I think of my father in sepiatones and blue (his other favourite color), and the handkerchief he always carried which was woven in those hues. I only know his war stories from hearsay, because he spared me the horrors he confided to my mother in private. I did not know how he had suffered until I became an adult.

On this Veterans Day, I choose to remember the man who taught me to connect to the Earth, a man who felt the seasons in his bones and set his course by their dictates. It was circumstance which made him a soldier, but a hero he was born.

His Favourite Flower

 Day 236: They were his favourite flower, blood-red peonies, and while he was a man who worked the soil and brought forth fine crops of corn, beans and squash, his assistance in my mother's flower beds was notoriously disastrous; to wit the painstaking removal of all her poppies in the belief that they were a type of thistle. Peony roots, however, were something he recognized, and he contributed to their well-being with generous applications of the hand-turned compost he brought up from the bottom of the field. It is peonies, not poppies, that I associate with men in uniformed service and veterans, and peonies which bring the tears to my eyes in empathy for the families which have been shattered by death in the name of war.

My father died not in battle during the Second World War, but some years later of an insidious disease contracted as a result of unimaginable deprivations suffered during almost four years in an internment camp. For as long as we lived within driving distance of the cemetery where he is buried, it was my mother's custom to blanket his grave on Memorial Day with 39 of the peonies he so loved: one for each year of his brief span of life.