Collecting Stories

Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and once again I am ill-prepared.  Last year, like this year, I had great hopes of preparing well in advance.  Come November I would have an outline of a story, I told myself.  Yeah, well...  Here it is once again, and I am still not prepared.

Last Tuesday evening my aunts and uncles came over with boxes and envelopes of photos of Dad.  Aunt Evelyn had a wealth of black and white pictures.  Aunt Mildred had images of us and Dad that were pretty funny.  We swapped stories.  Dad loved to tell stories.  He and his brother and sister grew up on a farm where they milked cows, fed pigs, mowed hay, harvested corn.  By the time he was twelve he drove a pick-up truck back and forth from the house to the fields.  In the winter he, his parents and siblings would wake up early, hours before dawn to tend to the animals, while his mother would be inside the house cooking a big breakfast.  The children would trudge a mile or two in the snow to school.  His brother, my uncle Bob, would end up eating the cake his mother packed for him in his lunch pail during the morning walk.  In the summer they played outside by the pond or in the fields.  

The black and white photographs are a glimpse into the past.  I can just imagine a movie picture screen, big and white, in a large theatre.  The lights dim, and the movie reel begins to roll.  The film flickers; you can hear the distant click-click and soon a steady hum.  In the darkened theatre you see the beam of light and dust dancing in its glow.  As the film steadies, the movie begins.  Black and white.  Sun-drenched afternoon.  A tall lanky boy with a tan cowboy hat.  A younger brother, running to the house for lemonade.  A little sister with golden curls damp with perspiration.  A mother washing her hands by the water pump.  Her husband reluctant to stand in front of the camera.  The photographer finally corals everyone, and there, set against a back drop of trees and a barn, the family with three children stood before the picture-taker.

Many, many years later Dad carved out a pond behind those trees to the left and built a comfortable home for his wife and children.  It was there outside my bedroom window that I planted a Kentucky coffee bean tree during my fourth grade year in observance of Arbor Day.  The tree is still there.  It's one of the first trees to shed its leaves during the autumn season.

As the days and years go by we will collect more stories and more pictures.  It's just odd to think that Dad won't be in any of the new ones.  Then again...as we live out those stories we'll carry him with us inside our hearts.