My Father’s Daughter
Dad’s stone I discovered last year in the HC park Memorial
A picture of our childhood home taken last year
My Father’s Daughter
Dear Dad,
It’s been 47 years since Jessica and I were visiting with you on the porch, not knowing it would be our last day with you. A lot has changed, but I’m guessing you know that. Mom, Jill, and Helena are all somewhere with you, and Jack is in memory care.
I can hardly believe Jessica will be 50 years old this year, and that you’ve been gone so long.
Ethan is married now, and you’d love knowing that Jessica and Brad live on the other side of Hales Corners Park from where we lived. Unfortunately, the public swimming pool has never been open since they moved there, for lack of money, they say. Some of my best summer days were spent in that pool.
I remember you sitting on your bicycle just outside the fence, fingers gripping the chain links for balance. I’d be on the high dive, and you’d be shouting encouragement.
I’d hunch over on the tip of the board, nose plugs on, hands clasped together above my head as you’d shown me. When I surfaced, you’d give me a number between 1 and 10 and tell me what to do to improve my dive. I never heard a 10.
But I do still hear your voice: always encouraging, always trying to get me to do a little more, a little better.
You’d like being with me here, where I live in the country. Today is a peaceful, hazy, damp day, full of the sounds of country life: Louisa, my pig, chomping on the grass; the ducks and geese quacking and splashing in the creek; Finnegan, my Jack Russell mix, snoring on the deck—and the birds. So many birds! Just now, I can hear the rat-a-tat-tat of a pileated woodpecker, the buzz of a hummingbird zooming past me to the feeder and to my potted flowers, and a barred owl in the distance.
You never talked about your time in World War II, the Korean War, or your 34 years of service in the United States Air Force. I often find myself wondering what that was like for you. My knowledge is limited, and all I have are a few of your old photos from back then of you and your buddies. I don’t even know if they made it home. I wonder how their fate affected you. I also wonder what you were like before the war. Were you different after? I only knew you as my dad, who called me Peanut Popper, and who I called Popsie Turtle.
Once, when I was visiting Jessica, I saw the memorial that contained a stone honoring your service. How fitting that it was in Hales Corners Park, where you watched me dive, and in winter took me ice skating and sledding. That toboggan slide might scare me now! We’d climb those steep steps, you’d shove the toboggan under your belly, and I’d lie face-down on your back, cold mittens clenched around your neck—and then we’d fly. We’d fly down that hill, me screaming in your ear, you most likely getting a face full of snow, till we’d spin out before the creek. Then we’d do it all again.
Memories of your presence are all I have left. Like the three flowering crab apple trees you planted in the corner of our front yard, one each for Jack, Jill, and me. Whenever I visit Jessica, I walk by our old house and see them.
So when I bought my place here, all those years ago, with hardly a dollar left to my name, the first thing I did was buy a crab apple tree. It’s huge now, and it flowered beautifully this year.
I also have a flagpole up at my house! I haven’t forgotten your love for your country or the flagpole you put up when we were kids. You had Jill, Jack, and me make handprints in the cement base. I remember thinking how cool it was to stick my hand in the wet cement. I see that the newer residents there took down the flagpole, though.
I added a pride flag and an Earth flag to mine. You were a good example of how we should love and care for all, people and animals alike. In that way, and others, I feel I am my father’s daughter.
Happy Popsie Turtle Day, Dad. It’s been too long since I’ve said that.
Love you and miss you,
Peanut Popper