Remembering My Father

Day 228: My father is a faint memory. I do not recall his voice, although his words sometimes come to mind. I do not remember his touch, only that he held me on his lap. My recollections of him are visual: at the saw in his wood shop, turning compost at the foot of the garden, driving through the wooden gate as I rode it closed behind the black Ford he always drove. But I cannot see him in my mind, digging in the flower beds among the peonies he so loved, although I know he tended them with care. They were his favourites, those blood-red blossoms, short-lived as was he. At 39 years of age, he passed from this world as a lingering victim of war, and on the following Memorial Day, my mother blanketed his grave with one bright bloom for each year of his life. Peonies, touching the world so briefly and with such beauty, and gone in the blink of an eye.