On The Ranch

Day 258: He would be a father in a few months, although he wouldn't have known it at the time this photo was taken, and the daughter who was to arrive rather earlier than predicted would inherit from him a love of the outdoors and of physical labour. Perhaps it was because he kept her by his side as he planted corn in hills, "One for the worm, one for the crow, one to die and one to grow," or as he turned the compost at the bottom of the garden. Even as his health failed some few years later, he kept a plot of vegetables and tended fruit trees in a small orchard. My dad was happiest when he was growing things or working the soil. When I think about him, I see corn shocks bundled by the gate in autumn, ringed with pumpkins and knobbly gourds. I taste crisp beans and peas, still sun-warm and fresh from the vine. I think of tractors and pitchforks and the smell of fresh-mown hay because those were the things which filled the few fleeting summers we had together, but most of all, I remember my dad as a young and handsome man. I console myself with that as the balancing of the scales against his early passage from life. He will always be young in my mind's eye.