My dad had a great garden in the year 1980. I don't remember much of the early 80s, but one thing I do recall is this garden... it was a place of calm and solace. I'd sit and eat cucumbers and snowpeas, and for most of that summer and autumn, I think I could have been considered an honorary vegetarian. I was often stuffed full of fresh picked veggies and barely touched my dinner. My dad is most likely talking to whomever took this photo and telling them about either the string he put up for the snowpea and cucumber climbing vines, or he's talking about the tree right next to his garden. I can hear his voice when I look at this picture; I like that I haven't forgotten how his voice sounds. I can hear him, loud and clear.

Maybe I am nuts.

I'm pretty sure I am nuts, because as much as it breaks my heart, I keep something on my computer desk my aunt found in one of my dad's various photograph boxes. My dad kept over a thousand photos in different boxes - a shoebox, a 4-set of glass tumblers box, a weird box for an electronic part, and other boxes of all shapes and sizes, but all cardboard boxes. My aunt helped out by arranging all of the photos for me by year, so I could transfer them to photo albums. While sorting through all of the pictures, she found a little card.

The day she brought it out to show me, I read it and held it and just cried. The most painful cry I had this year. But I was glad my Aunt found it, and I was glad my dad kept it.

Apparently, in October of 1975, I gave my dad what looks like an Easter card, as it has a bunny on it. I was seven years old at the time, I must have slipped it in with the mail, as I drew a little fake stamp on the envelope, along with a return-addy. My dad wrote the date he got it on the back of the envelope and kept it all of these years.







Every time I look at it, I go through a barrage of emotions, but every day I look at it also reminds me of how lucky I was in the first place to have a dad I could write a card like that to, and how much he must have loved that card to have kept it for 30+ years. There definitely were times my father must have questioned if I loved him, if I respected him, if I understood him - I wonder if that card was his solace, or if that card broke his heart... because a few times in my dad's life I made it very clear to him that my love for my parents was very conditional, my respect negotiable and reliant on the truth, and my understanding only possible with brutal honesty. One thing is for sure - my dad, at the end of his life, completely loved, respected and understood me, and knew I did love, respect and understand him. He also let me know, not with a card, but with words, that he agreed with me on some things we'd debated about for years and years. Except for one thing - he didn't agree with me that death is another side of life. He really tought that it was just 'lights out' whereas I think our energy goes on and on for an eternity.

I know he's out there in the universe right now happy that his theory was wrong.

And not shocked at all that his daughter was right. (or at least I like to think of it in this way, hahaha!)

Man, I miss him.