Greetings Dear Ones!

Whew! It’s been a minute… I have thought of you often, even written to you a few times, always interrupted by the swells and surges of summer chores. Threads and sentences have been left to dangle, along with an abandoned knitting project whose needle I have misplaced. I have been called away by golden days, dandy mayhem, and sometimes just the scent of the wind in the garden as I weed. I had fifteen wedding gowns and a pasture to fence in June. The blueberries took charge of me in early August and just as their tyranny was subsiding, the peaches showed up to boss me around. (They are getting canned this weekend.) Last week, a broken kitchen sink faucet was supreme monarch for a soggy three-day reign that included flooded counters and me learning how to use a basin wrench. I went to the hardware store, bought the best tool I could, and thought of my dear old dad—the ultimate collector of Good Tools. Today is the first anniversary of his death. I have survived an entire year knowing I will never again hear his secret to a good blueberry pie, or “how to cut a pepper,” something he insisted on demonstrating every time he cut a pepper.

My mother, now living alone, had a knee replacement in July and I packed up 35 ski club jackets that needed new zippers and set up a temporary shop in her dining room in Pennsylvania so I could care for her for three weeks while we both mended ragged things that had suffered years of abuse and neglect. (The knee got better faster than the ski jackets!)

I loved being able to care for my mother, who is at heart a hard-boiled New Englander who doesn’t like to need anything. I loved being a witness to her resilience and her amazing spirit which can switch from crabby to hilarious in a single beat. It’s a pleasure to spend time around a strong woman who can laugh at herself.

“What’s all this?” she snaps, filling out her paperwork at her two-week checkup with the surgeon.

“It’s a pop quiz you should know most of the answers to,” I say, “like where you live, your date of birth…”

“Yes, I know,” she says with increasing vexation, “but how am I supposed to know what medications I am on! Shouldn’t the doctor already know this? He prescribed them!”

“Leave it blank,” I say.

“And why does it say here, ‘denies use of alcohol and tobacco?”

I look at my tiny, pious, daily communicant Catholic mother with her miraculous medals and crucifix around her neck, survey the crowded waiting room, and announce in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “Because, Mother, when the intake person interviewed you before the surgery and asked you if you smoked and drank, you LIED TO THEM and said NO.”

She gasps. I begin to giggle like I am in church and cannot stop.

The young woman seated nearest her, a complete stranger, leans over, gives her a hug, and says, “aw…honey, that just makes me love you all the more!”

From the center of that unsolicited human contact, my mother fixes me in the sights of her ray gun eyes and shoots a fire powerful enough to scorch misbehaving children twenty yards away and get them to sit up straight and eat their vegetables without a fuss.

My mother has abstained from all alcohol except the blood of Christ for more than twenty years. She has never smoked. After the surgery, we had to get her off the Percocet as quickly as possible because it just made her want to get up and vacuum. (You know you are from New England when all you need is ice to heal.)

While I initially worried that my tenure there would eventually require a large amount of tequila and a gun, I cherished the unexpected gift of living in my childhood home without the hoopla of a big family gathering. It was just me and Mum, though I kept expecting to see my father rounding every corner. I could feel his presence most strongly in the kitchen, as I pawed through drawers filled with gadgets, and vast quantities of spices, and towers of pots and pans he had hoarded through the years. “I think the man secretly planned to open a restaurant and not tell you,” I said to my mother.

I could see him using every pot under the counter until he found the right one. ‘If you’re going to use one pot, hell, why not use them all?’ was his attitude. His version of “Cleaning as he went” involved a grubby rag that just smeared pizza sauce along a previously pristine counter. He could turn absolutely anything into a meal; he could also turn anything into a mess.

As my brother said at Dad’s memorial, “If you are going to talk about my father, you are going to have to use a lot of F words,” a statement that instantly made my mother’s jaw clench. She was anxious that our beloved Patriarch be remembered as a pious man, one who would never (EVER) play games such as “pull my finger” with the grandchildren. My brother looked straight at my mother with a devilish twinkle in his eyes. She was so nervous about what his children had to say about him that none of us was allowed to give a eulogy at the mass—only a proper young priest my dad had mentored as a seminarian was allowed to give a few bland words about “a very good man” who would be missed by the parish. The man my mother wanted remembered was an alien confection of duty, piety, and restraint—a boring sort of garden in which some of the most outrageous and fabulous blossoms had been torn out along with the weeds.

But then my brother stood up after the meal, rang his glass to get our attention, and began to discuss the F words. I thought my mother was going to pass out. He let the pause sink in, enjoying the delay, until she could stand it no more. “While we never heard my father say them, he lived them large,” he said, “and they were Faith, Friends, Family, and Food…though not necessarily in that order!”

I wish I had a copy of my brother’s tribute—his words are so much better than mine—but I remember the gist of it. He talked about how my dad shared his faith with us, which was great because we knew which prayers to say each time he climbed a ladder to fix something. Nothing puts the fear of God in a body like having the largest member of the tribe ascend a rickety ladder and accidentally drop tools made of metal on your head as you attempt to steady the ladder. My dad could fix just about anything—though he often did it in the way that took the longest, cost the most, and involved a modicum of bloodshed—like the time he dropped a drill on his own foot. He tried to fix as much as possible himself or deny it needed fixing. Our front door blew open each time the wind blew for at least fifteen years before my mother called a carpenter and got a new one installed. He approached household and farm repairs with the cagey optimism of an underweight fighter who thinks he can take on an opponent twice his size. He usually came back bloodied, bruised, and saying words we were not allowed to repeat.

He had a vast number of tools, none of which was precisely the right one for the job at hand, partly because he adored tools and partly because his organizational system did not involve putting things back where he found them but leaving them where he last used them. This is how our family came to own more than nineteen hammers at any given time. Anyone wishing to hammer something found it more expedient simply to buy a fresh hammer from the local hardware store rather than attempt to find one on Dad’s workbench.

My father was not a neat man but he was fabulously Creative—a generous genius. He usually left the kitchen looking like a tiny restaurant had just exploded. He saw recipes merely as “suggestions,” kind of the way I see sewing patterns, or a really good musician plays way more than the notes on the page. I can still see the fanatical gleam in his eyes as he tells me the recipe called for [a sensible ingredient] but he substituted [something ridiculous] and doubled the amount. He was forever a scientist, creating a strange alchemy of things that were fat-free, or gluten-free, or sugar-free, depending on the culinary era. Once, he made “keto waffles” out of pulverized pork rinds and eggs. Whatever he made, he made way too much of it—his recipes, like his spirit, were larger than could be managed in a single container. He was a loaves and fishes kind of guy, always ready to feed multitudes.

If we could still see the floor in his workshop, apparently, we were doing fine; No need to sweep. He made beautiful things in his wood-working shop, turning old fence boards into family treasures: spice racks, tables, bookshelves, cutting boards and peg racks to hang on the walls. He was forever churning out beautiful gifts for his family and friends, though humbly insisting his chief product was sawdust.

He didn’t talk a lot about details or “mushy stuff” like emotions. He stuck to “the Big Picture.” His dying advice to my son was, “Do Good Stuff; Don’t Do Bad Stuff. You know the difference.” (This is the same man who taught me to drive with only two instructions: “Keep the car on the road. Dodge the other cars.”)

Dad showed his love by Doing Good Stuff. He was interested in Everything. Long before Google was invented, you could always ask Dad about any random bit of trivia and get a dissertation on the subject as if he had minored in it in college. He learned the names of all the cloud formations in fifth grade and never forgot them. He was passionate about history, hobbies, sports, and music. He cooked for us. He fixed things, or tried, until the job was either finished or interrupted by a quick trip to the hospital. His favorite thing in the world was to have his family gathered around a table crowded with his concoctions. He would hold our hands and invoke the blessing, beaming at each of us as he did, blissfully dismissive of my mother grinding her teeth into stumps over how the kitchen looked like a crime scene.

He tried.

Once, when I was very young, attempting to console him, I patted him and said “from what I can see, a father has two jobs: fund the bliss and take the blame. You do both these things with admirable constancy.” He never stopped repeating that motto. He funded the bliss, as well as the educations of five grateful children. He also took a lot of blame. (And deserved most of it.)

There was deep love and laughter at the center of everything he did. My siblings and his grandchildren cherish our memories of being Fed and cared for by a man whose love was Big, Messy, Generous, occasionally covered in sauce or sawdust, yet, like his homemade pizza, simply… The Best.

I still talk to him all the time—I still hear his voice when I cut a pepper or change a tire or wander around my own farm looking for a hammer—I just don’t need a phone to do it. 365 days later, I’m only just getting used to the ache of him being “everywhere and nowhere,” kind of like a missing hammer. It’s a pain I hope never goes away. It reminds me of all the ways I got to be so very loved by such an incredibly flawed and fabulous human. I could not be more grateful for all he taught me. Even now, I’m still learning.

Keep Mending, Dear Ones! Keep Doing Good Stuff. Keep cooking and tasting and simmering and Serving The Gift. It’s all a Gift. Every bit of it.

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy