Life always goes on, no matter how much you feel like it's come to an end. It's been almost three months since Daddy went Home. We are adjusting slowly but surely to the incredible hole in our lives that his passing has left. Some days are just simply tough, like holidays... like today, our first Father's Day without him. But again, life goes on... sun up, sun down, over and over. It just keep moving forward.
Mom has lots of tough days; all her days are tough days. She awakens to an empty breakfast table after 70 years of being with him. I can't begin to compare the pain I feel to what she has. Only that ever marching time will help ease the pain, if ever it can.
The rest of us see him everywhere we go. His favorite chair, now empty, the barn yard where the geese and dogs look for him in vain, his lovely grapevines growing without the tender care it once had. We get sad and it's hard to remind ourselves to think in celebration of how lucky we were to have had him so long (remember he had cancer back in the 70s too). We only now realize how truly blessed we were that God chose us to be part of his intimate life and he to be part of ours. But deep inside, we knew we were, just not how much.
We have some good days too, although not so many as the tough. It's getting better, I guess. I'll go to do something, like check my tomato plants and suddenly I'll remember that Daddy taught me what to look for and how to do things right. He taught me practically everything. Maybe I should make one of those posters like "Everything I know I Learned From My Cat." Remember those? I learned so much from my dad...
Let's see - what are some things I learned? How to mend fishing nets. How to call hogs. How to feed hogs without getting run over by them. And how to feed dogs, geese, chickens, cows and anything else that needed feeding. How to herd the stupidest sheep that can see a gate opening and never figure out they have to go through it. How to pluck feathers off a chicken. Oh, and cleaning those chickens ("Take off everything you don't want to eat," he'd say). How to weed the garden (when the sun was cooking us I always hated learning that one). How to put a worm on a hook. How to shoot straight and to walk quietly in the woods without making a sound. How to look for sun-dogs in the sky and read the clouds. How to get out splinters (he and I were the go-to house doctors back in the day). How to prune grapevines. We all learned how to make wine. How to drive a car, truck, boat, ATV, many tractors, and a combine. How to disk. How to cut grass that took hours. How to check the oil in cars, trucks, lawn mowers, tractors. How to siphon. How to set a rabbit trap. How to sweep the barn without making a dust cloud. How to work hard. How to be accountable. How to help anyone in need. How your word is your bond. How to hold hands when we pray.
My list could go on forever.
I guess you can tell we were country farm people.
I loved it all. Really... even weeding. And we'd weed in the soybean fields where sometimes a row was so long it would take all morning just to go up and back one time. Hot sweaty itchy weeding.
So on this Father's Day I'd say "Enjoy your dads while you have them, even if they are not perfect. Some day you won't have the chance except in memory so make every day a good memory."
