Daddy’s Girl
This was the post I put together when I discovered my blog was infected. I posted it to my writer’s group blog but in case you didn’t get to read it and with Dad’s 80th birthday coming up, I thought I’d share it here.
Yesterday I bundled up without regard for fashion or vanity to spend some time in the snow with the puppy (11 months old today and pretty big). He’s been getting neglected while I have centered my energies around nursing my husband as he recovers from knee replacement surgery. So I klunked around the yard with the dog, decked in somebody’s old snow pants, wool socks, Columbia boots, Irish sweater, a red, hand-me-down, granny winter jacket, with thick gloves and a fitted stocking cap.
Once I felt that Cody (the big puppy) had had sufficient attention and snow romping, I resumed my Florence Nightingale role. Still dressed in my duds, I went out to the garage freezer to fetch the two frozen terrycloth tube bags filled with corn kernels that my husband and I had constructed for the purpose of icing his knee and leg while he rehabbed. Those bags turned out to be heavier than one would think. I slung them over my shoulders. As I trudged back into the house, I caught my reflection in the garage window and, for a brief second, I saw my Dad the way he used to look coming up the back steps at the end of a winter construction workday in his signature combat boots and his cuffeed stocking cap shrunk back on his head so that his ears were sticking out from under it.
“Hi” I said.
It was nice to see him.
Daddy’s Girl Part II
It was Valentine’s Day when I wrote the above, I followed it up with this:
I recalled a story that would have been perfect to include and very in tune with the holiday. I share it now. It is a story my Mom has liked to tell for as long as I can remember.
Being the firstborn of eleven, I enjoyed some substantial quality alone time with my parents for the first twenty months of my life. My mother taught me colors and shapes and numbers while we waited on the porch stoop for my Dad to come home from work each day. My Dad was a mason, a bricklayer. He worked with heavy block and concrete and often came home covered in concrete dust. He liked a good soak in the tub at the end of his day, besides which we didn’t have a shower. As a toddler, I would regularly go in the bathroom and chat with my Dad while he soaked and when he dried off. In February of my second year, my mother had been spending a lot of time with me cutting out heart shapes and teaching me about “Valentines”. Apparently after one of our father/daughter tubside chats, I came out into the kitchen and reported to my mother, in that high-pitched voice that toddlers have, that “Daddy has a very nice Valentine!”
As to exactly which angle of which part of his anatomy I was astutely observing, well, that remains pretty much up for grabs, so to speak.
