Thirty years ago my family moved onto a piece of property owned by a man that my little brother would later be named after. My dad is a wood worker, the man was a contractor and, despite their great age difference, they made a connection.
The house that I grew up in holds most of my childhood memories including playing Badminton until all hours of the night with the old mans grandson who visited each summer from Ecuador, laying in the grass, struggling through the chicken pox at the height of summer and eating warm tomatoes off the vine that had been sowed and cared for by my mom and sprinkled with a bit of salt, to name just a few.
After the man passed, there were many changes on the property, but my dad and his shop remained a fixture. There was traded work and care taking, relationships built and maintained.
Shortly after Fish Girl was born, my dad generously took a portion of his large shop space and turned it into a small studio apartment for us. We built a small yard, planted a few seeds and put in a small patch of our very own grass. It wasn’t fancy, but it was exactly what we needed…safety, security, manageable costs, a comfortable place to call our own for a little while.
As Fish Girl grew, the necessity for a larger space became apparent and so we looked around at various houses and apartments and moved on. That tiny apartment, though, after holding us so gently for several years, became a safe space, a stepping stone for many other family members and friends who were making their way from one part of their life into another.
A few months ago, my dad got notice that he would have to leave the property. Management of the property was changing hands and changes were in the works. And so, the hunt for a new shop space began and (luckily) quickly ended with an offer from an old colleague to transform an old space into a new space that would fit my dad’s needs. And so the moving began for both my dad and my brother, who happened to be the latest resident of the tiny apartment.
Towards the end of the moving process, my dad mentioned that there was a handful of old bricks that Brother had used to build an herb spiral that we could take and use if we were so inclined. So, Tool Lady and I made our way over to the old property and loaded some bricks in the back of her truck. Then, as life and time would have it, the bricks stayed in the back of her truck until about a week ago when I finally got around to taking them out and stacking them up in the backyard.
I still don’t know what I’ll do with all of the bricks (a path? a small area for a table and chairs?), but I am happy to have them as a small reminder of all the years we spent on that property.
xoxo,
M
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