This is What I Remember

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