This is What I Remember:
camping trips with a heavy
canvas tent that smelled of cool moldy earth and metal poles that clicked into
place with stubborn metal buttons that were too hard to press with my delicate
thumbs
cotton sleeping bags of
forest green or navy blue with flannel linings printed with ducks in flight or
hunting dogs on point
duck decoys carved by hand by
my Dad and polished to a gleaming finish with finer and finer grains of
sandpaper, or painted in detail to look just like the duck; green headed
mallard or multihued wood duck
the garage woodshop smelling
of warm sawdust off fragrant planks, sharp knives and gouges and chisels in a
block, the searing smell of freshly cut wood blocks and the smoky burn of Dad’s
initials branded into a finished piece
the pungent odor of tanned
hides and chemicals in a vat that cured the skins, the intricate tooling
equipment and all the patterns used to hammer out a picture on the moistened
leather
the rusted red burn barrel next to
the garage on blackened bricks where he would burn leaves and paper and wood
scraps in the crisp autumn air, ashes lifting in full newspaper sheets and
disintegrating as they drifted to the ground
the small playhouse that he
built off the kitchen window so they could pass us pitchers of red Kool-aid and
ants-on-a-log: celery sticks with peanut butter filling the length of the rib
and dotted with raisins
his stubbled face that hurt
to kiss, that he would rub against my too delicate skin, his lumpy belly that
was bigger than Santa’s and too large to encircle
the wagon wheel couch he made
with two half-round arms and iron edges, stubbing toes on that immovable iron
and the burlap-like cushion covers in dark brown
and the matching wagon wheel
table with the hard thick iron rim at head level, then eye level, then mouth
level, that tasted cold and metallic, and the glass table top disk so large and
round, and the centerpiece wheel hub with a deep depression in the center where
we could hide small things
the sound it made when mom,
in anger, lifted the edge of the whole table and dropped it to the floor
shattering the huge sheet of glass, and the Plexiglas top that replaced it
after she broke it the second time and how it became scratched and cloudy and
was never as good as glass
his anger and the volume and
timbre of his huge terrifying voice consuming all the other sound, the sound of
his mammoth footfalls as he came after her or us, bounding like a madman, vast
and looming in his enormity
the yelling and fear and
breaking of all things
the night when we were
hustled in our pajamas into the car and escaped to the house of a friend, and
how I rode my bike home a week later to visit Dad, alone now in our house, and
how I couldn’t think of anything to say.
~Andrine de la Rocha
