My Father

Life was not easy for my father. He had the heart and soul of a farmer, but life never seemed to cooperate and he worked where he could. My mother contracted polio when she was pregnant with their fourth child. Her subsequent hospitalization and rehabilitation for the next two years would devastate this man with four young sons. His much loved mother had died shortly before his wife's illness and life could not be more difficult. Three of his sons stayed with families the church provided. The infant born on a rocking bed with a critically ill mother, who the church had declared would be the one chosen to live stayed with my mother's sister raised as a twin with her baby daughter. It was the best any could do in a situation. no one could prepare for.
He worked two sometimes three jobs to support them. The closest he came to working the land was picking up the bruised dropped apples on the ground. The local refrigerator factory was his main source of income, a press operator, a hot noisy, thankless job. He would bar tend on the weekends and began a life long battle with the liquid sedative.

He would have four more children and was sentenced to forty-two years in the factory. He would try to farm in the short Michigan summers and plant huge gardens. His hands in the dirt or the sun beating down as he drove his most prized possession a Ford tractor were his moments of joy between the complications of weather, time, and his own psychological darkness.
Through the years my children were able to help with these acreages of garden planting,weeding, picking off potato bugs and tomato worms instead of chemical annihilators and the harvest of rich colored vegetables and rows of sweet flowers. One summer I noticed a peculiar pattern in the bean field bordering the garden. There was large uncultivated circle of dirt and weeds. I asked my father what was wrong with that piece insects, contamination.... He just laughed and said he would show us if we were quiet. I and my two solemn little men followed my dad, clad in bib overalls, his neck and face red with sun, his silver hair glinting in the light. We reached the odd circle in the field when a large bird came squawking toward us screeching and dragging her wing as she danced an overwrought jig.
"It's a killdeer, they do that to protect their nest"
He had disked plowed, planted and all the other necessities in preparation for a successful harvest in an irregular crop line around the small home in the ground.
My father had protected and nurtured this small family just as he had taken care of his own, never the easy way, but the only way he knew how to, with responsibility and respect for all that had been placed in his care.