In the mornings, after I would wake with that crisp cold air burning my cheeks and the sound of my father splitting tinder at the woodheap, we would crowd around the wood stove fighting for a turn to toast our thick slabs of white bread over the hot coals. My father would lean across the stove, his cup kept warm on the white enamel stove warmers and the ash from his cigarette sometimes landing in the ironstone thunder egg he used as an ashtray and sometimes landing on the floor where he would hurriedly spread it out on the mottled pink linoleum to hide his mistake before someone snapped at him.
The kitchen was crowded and stuffy, the yellow painted vj boards that lined the ceiling, black with grease and soot.
My parents voices starting softly, discussed what would be done that day; the fences to be checked, the cows to be preganancy tested and the performance of the new bull. It seems always that the volume would rise and my mother would begin to speak louder as she sensed my father was not agreeing with her, not bending to her will as she believed then and still believes is the only possible conclusion in all her conversations. Finally my father would dump his cup on the sink, stub out his cigarette and shuffle, sock footed, to the back stairs where his oldest heeled RMWilliams boots would slide over his boot shaped feet and his stained and holey second-best Akubra would land in its familiar groove upon his forehead.
Sometimes I would rush after my father, squeezing my backside onto the stair beside him, working my way through the box of old boots. Always hoping my feet may have grown enough to slide into them like his did but always, in the end, chasing after him my pattering feet wearing shoes of hard skin and painful cold.
His gentle silence and firm brown hands would guide me out past the woodheap, past the feedshed and the utes. Out there, just us in the front paddock, he would spring it on me suddenly. "Race you to the yards?" And I would run on my toes to avoid the sharp frostbitten grass, prancing like Bambi down the hill, reaching out in strides as long as I could make them.
My father never let me win though, he would stay just ahead. He made me try so very hard but when I held out my arms out to stop myself against the rattling hayshed gates he was always already there, slowing to a stop beside me, laughing and puffing and telling me how good I was and how hard it was for him to beat me now.
My athletics coach, my father: 24 January 1926 - 25 March 1987
3 comments:
Once again...you tell a story so well...I see how you do it...yet I know I can't...a rare talent.
My feet are burning from the frostbite, my lungs aching from sucking in the morning air as I ran with you and your Dad.
What a wonderful role model your Dad was in his easygoing way...it's a shame he was taken so soon...but he left so much of himself behind in the world, in his children and grandchildren...and I guess that's how the world evolves...doesn't seem fair sometimes though...
Alice, you take my breath away. Thank you.
i love your stories about your dad. it was another of those that drew me into reading your blog. you really have to find a publisher :)
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