Notes from My Dad's Garage where he is Twenty One Months Dead

The slow drift of the landscape of grief

Photo by Ben Moreland on Unsplash

Before I begin, let me just tell you about this - the magazine that I founded and edit, Spelt, a magazine devoted to celebrating and validating the rural experience now has a brand new podcast, and our first episode, featuring the fantastic poet Sharon Black, is now live:

The Spelt Podcast

We covered a lot of ground in this interview - craft, motherhood, isolated rural living, the pressures of creativity, retreats and facilitating. You might enjoy it.

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Notes from My Dad's Garage where he is Fourteen Months Dead

I’m on chicken duty. My mum is away with her sisters and so house sitting of the small holding is down to me, for a couple fo days at least. To call it a small holding would be incorrect. I call it what my dad used to call it and yet even in his prime, with a couple of sheep, 70 chickens and enough land to grow veg and gather wood for two people to be almost self sustaining, it was still a small small holding. Now it is not really even that. It is a giant veg patch, a small orchard, and a field with a variety of trees and a nature pond way down at the bottom. This is the field where my dad’s body is buried.

As I arrive there is a sea fret peeling itself away and back like a sea-tide. When I woke in the morning it was thick silver-grey. I couldn’t see the bottom of my own garden. But now it is unravelling, floating in wispy columns across the road, but underscored with a hot sun. It feels like it might be back later. By the time I’ve finished my jobs at my parent’s house, my mum’s house, it is clear blue sky and the scent of sea on the breeze.

At the small holding the birds are singing. A blackbird arrives and flits up and down the garden wall expectantly, waiting for the feeders to be replenished. Bad luck Blackbird, I don’t know where she keeps the bird food. I stop to examine my mum’s roses. Mine have black spot on them, hers do not. I consider how I might have to move mine, which are in pots, further down the garden. It’s the partial shade that’s causing problems I think and a wet winter. My dad, brought up on a farm, child of generations of farmers, had a natural affinity with plants that I don’t seem o have inherited. He planted these roses. They have thrived.

And then it’s time to feed the chickens. I walk up the forget-me-not lined path and enter the cavernous garage/workshop/barn. It’s the first time I have been there since my mum sold my parents enormous camper van and the sudden emptiness of the space shocks me. The camper van was a huge part of their lives, for maybe thirty years. They loved the wild life of it, the ability to go anywhere, sleep where they stopped, to be connected to the world with their own travelling home. Now it’s gone. It’s not just the space that catches me off guard, with the now exposed maw of pit and ladder which had been hidden beneath. It’s that, obviously, my dad’s tools have all been moved out of the way. It’s that, when the camper van was taken away, my mum, rightly, sent a load of batteries, tools, covers…all the bits and pieces that my dad had been working on for the van, with it. Feeling pro active, she’d sent an old car that had been rotting on the driveway to the scrappers too, along with a load of scrap that was my dad’s and which she, an elderly lady, will have no use for now. What is left is a different place - my dad is gone. He has been dead fourteen months. But now, from this place, his workshop, he is properly gone. The last time I was in here, his tools were still spread by the side of the van, a semi circle of tools where he had knelt. His last sketches, a half sawn piece of wood in a lathe, a hammer put down and not picked up again. His presence was here, and now it’s gone.

I am not sad, not exactly. One cannot keep a semi circle of tools on a garage floor just because it still carries the shape of your father, it’s not practical and probably not healthy to hold onto empty air like that, but I find it interesting to notice, to realise this graduation of change, the moving away from the life that a person lived. It is like visiting a landscape that I used to know and realising that the it wasn’t what you thought it was. It was a temporary place, not a permanent place. Life is temporary. People are temporary.

I fill the buckets with feed, make my way down the dewy grass where the chickens, what’s left of them, are lined up along the fence. I have to tempt them away from the gate with a handful of bread. Once fed, eggs collected, I take a few minutes to visit my dad’s grave which has a few rocks marking out the outline of it, so that we know where it is. Nothing else. Above it an oak tree is fresh green and the light is falling through the leaves and dappling the grass below. The field is full of bees and birds, and bluebells. It is not an awful place to be buried.

Then home, to my little terrace house, my black-spot roses.

Until next time

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