Rebeccalou: This Writer’s Life

Decades ago and years younger, my father loved to imitate Tim Conway from the Carol Burnett Show. Do your Tim Conway, we’d say when we were all home for Christmas. Dad would curl his body into the stooped form of an old man and with arms pumping ever so slightly, shuffle from his favorite wing-backed chair to the dinner table. The imitation was impeccable. We laughed ourselves off the sofa. Dad turned eighty the summer Mom died, with the blood pressure and pulse of a man half his age. A few years of lonely and he was old. His back melted into a curve and froze. His skin went pale and dry. He stopped trying to hear. The last time he stepped on the scale he weighed one hundred twenty four pounds, fully clothed, wearing shoes and a jacket. I followed in slow motion as he shuffled down the corridor to the doctor’s office, weak and infinitely tired, white-knuckling the bar of the walker, his head pushed forward to point the way. Is this what happens? Do we finally become the character we once pretended to be?

When I went looking for the wedding picture of my parents a month ago, I found this snapshot among a stack I had collected when we moved Dad to Johnson Village. I was a freshman in college, 1968, back for the weekend to help with the leaves. My parents lived on a piece of property that was home to roughly a hundred oak trees. The gathering and burning of the leaves was an annual ritual that signaled the imminent return of the Minnesota winter. 

Raised on a farm, Dad owned every piece of equipment required for proper leaf removal: a signature yellow International Harvester lawn tractor, three sweepers, a variety of rakes, two large heavy-duty tarps and two John Deere power mowers. Obsessive by nature and compulsive in habit, Dad kept the place immaculate every season of the year.

My father was a tax accountant and an abstractor who wore a tie and went to an office five days a week for close to fifty years. But the dad I connected with was a man who loved nothing more than putting on a cap, grabbing a pair of sturdy gloves and working outside, especially when he had a partner. “I’d hate to be doing this alone,” he would say every time we filled another tarp. “I sure am glad you came home to help.”

Harvesting the leaves satisfied our shared propensity for orderliness, something we understood about one another. For those hours or possibly few days before the wind, so common to that part of the country, kicked up more leaves, we took great satisfaction in the uncluttered lawn we left in our wake. We loved being outside, in nature, doing work that brought immediate results: rake the leaves away from the base of the trees, collect them with sweepers, dump the contents of the bins onto a thick canvas tarp, haul each load to the front of the property and roll the dusty heap into the ditch, forming pile after pile alongside the road. 

At dusk—provided the adjacent woods and the house were downwind—we’d light the piles on fire. Acorns popped in the flames. Leaves of assorted size and color succumbed to the heat. In a dry year, you could hear the crunch and crumble of disintegration. We stood silent and stared at the fire, prodding it along, poking at the embers, hair and clothes smelling of smoke, bodies tired to the bone, spirits content.

My parents sold their home and property in 1994, and moved to Denver. Some years ago, serious flooding throughout the Red River Valley scared the new owners into transporting the home to higher ground a few miles away. Abandoned and untended, the acreage has grown wild and disheveled, looking nothing like it did under Dad’s care. “I’m glad your dad didn’t have to see that happen,” Uncle Howard wrote in an email this fall. “It would have really been hard on him.”

My father died at Porter Hospice on December 4, 2006, in the same room Mom had occupied four years earlier. The day prior, I sat with my husband and our children at Dad’s bedside and talked about doing the leaves together, about camping on South Pike Bay, about limping into his office one June morning after tripping on the railroad tracks and sliding hands-first through a patch of gravel. I talked about him being with Mom again, and I told him what a great dad he had been. His eyes were closed. He hadn’t spoken for two days. With every story, he squeezed my hand tighter. When it came time to leave, he would not let go. The kids were hungry. Darkness had settled outside the window with the bird feeder at its ledge. I promised to return in a few hours, and did, but in that short interim Dad had moved that much closer to the other side. I don’t believe he knew I was in the room. His breathing had become more shallow. He didn’t move, not so much as a twitch. A nurse called just before noon the following morning to tell me he had passed.

This fall I stepped into our tiny backyard, the grass covered in aspen and locust leaves, and remembered the October weekend forty years ago. I raked rhythmically, wearing gloves and a cap, taking meticulous care to gather every leaf, twig and pod. I had no need for a riding tractor, a sweeper or a tarp. There was no fire. The dry, dusty piles went into a compost bin for their subsequent return to the earth next spring. 

During our family’s exchange of gratitude that evening, I shared that I was thankful for my dad, for the kind of man he was and for all the things I had learned from him. The kids looked up from their plates, afraid they might see tears, and nodded.