Most of my most vivid memories with my father involve outdoor chores–mainly those tied to wood. Living in an old New England vernacular house, up on a hill looking down on Lakeport, we kids had many routine tasks to help upkeep all of the wood on the exterior, as well as the surrounding woods. As an introverted child, I appreciated the quiet rhythm of some of these tasks–scraping chipped paint off of shutters, doors, & exterior planks, for example–which allowed for deep thought in the flow of the activity. There was something satisfying in flaking off a sheath of cracked paint in one blow, the beveled edge of the metal scraper sliding under at just the right angle. Looking back, I’m sure some of those old layers of paint likely contained lead, but I guess I survived regardless.

My father, even though outgoing & gregarious, had a solitary nature at heart. He liked disappearing into the woods to clear brush or getting into the swing of painting the house in sections, tall aluminum ladder leaning against the house near the roof.

Scraping paint earned my father’s respect, as he appreciated my hard work. So many of my chores involved wood when I really think about it, even beyond the house’s exterior upkeep. From chopping & stacking firewood for winter to using massive hedge clippers to clear out scrubby tree growth & undergrowth that choked up the woods around the house, my household labor seemed so much easier to do when it involved the outdoors. One of my father’s proudest moments stemmed from clearing out all of the young woodsy growth from the property to allow for the wind to sweep through & in between the massive older trees. The effect was truly beautiful. Massive trunks with pine-needle-covered grounds wrapping around & between them. He’d remark on the happy effect of reducing mosquitoes & pesky insects that would curtail outdoor lounging in the evenings. Breezes were better able to sweep through the land, keeping everything airy, light, & clean.

So many hours of my youth were spent in those woods, but I didn’t mind because I enjoyed the result as well as the process itself.

We had a piece of property in Meredith, NH, that my parents owned, called “The Property.” Roughly thirty acres of wooded land abutting what is now a state park provided our family with plenty of fuel during those cold winters during the energy crisis of my youth. All that was needed was the physical labor, & my parents had four strong sons to help contribute. So much younger & a girl, my tasks mainly involved carrying & stacking wood. We’d haul the massive piles of firewood by the backdoor into the cellar through the bulkhead, so that we’d have nice neat stacks for bringing up to the wood ring beside the living room fireplace. I remember the scent of the wood burning in the fireplace outside, & fall never feels quite like fall without it.

There’s a poem by Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays, which reminds me of my father. Maybe it’s because my father worked so much outside of the house (a plant manager at GE in Lynn, MA) when I was a child that the only one-on-one time I really had with him involved chores, since he needed to tend to the maintenance of the house when he was home? If I wanted to spend time with my dad in an active way, then I needed to work with or near him. Looking back, I see that most memories of both of my parents involved household work. They were rarely idle or sitting down. My father didn’t really know how to play with a little girl, other than checkers or cards which became fairly competitive games, so I had to steal what time I could by working. My brothers were able to bond with my dad over things like basketball, horseshoes, darts, cards, & sporting events on the TV, but my range of activities with him was quite limited.

And so I think of my father when I see these kinds of things–paint scrapers, hedge clippers, axes & wood rings.

A wood fire reminds me of my father in that he’d have these massive brush blazes or bonfires to dispose of all of the cleared saplings, shrubs, & undergrowth we had cleared from the woods. One time, he lost a little bit of control over one of those fires & singed a massive limb of the old oak tree in our front yard roughly 15-18 feet above. Firetrucks arrived to investigate the matter, since the smoke & flames of that bonfire could be seen from a ways away from the bottom of the hill, but by that time they got to house my dad had already used a hose to bring the blaze back down to a reasonable size. He acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, “Everything’s all under control here”! He’d laugh about that when he tell and retell that story to captive audiences. I like to think of my father like that, laughing & telling stories, a true bon vivant.

So, I leave you with above-mentioned poem by Robert Hayden that I love, a poem which reminds me of my dad in its quiet simplicity & profundity:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking,
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?