UnBuilding My Father
For decades the A-frame, sleeping cabin
for two, angled sharply past the tall
shrub beyond the cabin’s corner, its gable
a long straight line above salal carpet,
far below our big Doug fir and Western
hemlock, the inverted steep V and cedar
boards bleached from a diet of steady
rainseep and marine air. When I
unlocked the door atop three small
steps its own must swirled in my nostrils
and I knew I stood only here.
Near but separate, private sanctum
where low voices didn’t creep inside
open bedroom windows. Dad designed,
blocked, sawed, nailed frame, threaded
cedar panels bottom up, fitted small
door window, stretched mesh below
apex. We took turns sleeping beneath
diagonal 2” x 4” braces, sniffed the
faint tarpaper, exchanged confidences.
Once a college friend, Marsha White,
slept in the A-frame but I only kissed
her goodnight, too shy for sex. Then I
walked into my adulthood as did my
brothers and after more summers,
sons or nephews unrolled sleeping
bags, warmed the hut with laughter
but they also departed and it stood
abandoned, storage shed of forgotten
voices. Moss surged on cedar, dirt
moistened corner posts and plywood
edges. New owner of familiar ground,
I crowbar soft panels, intent on
replicating Dad’s weave, board by board;
I dig out corner anchors, hear hammer
or bar sink into pulp, concede the spread
of rot. Instead of makeover, my brother
and I pry the supports, pummel patches
of siding, break the floor, undoing step
by step Dad’s measurements and curses
and sweat. Never a builder easy with tools—
failed inheritance—my hands touch his
half a century later, I throw down the pieces
he crafted into a fairy tale A, its scent lost
in time’s thickening soil.
Tree = Truth
“Never let anyone touch this tree,” a local arborist
told my mother decades ago.
Dad planted the redwood in the ‘60s before
the remodel and it rose,
widening cone with fat base, near
the new garage’s front corner.
I trimmed lowest branches, swept needles
every visit, fingered red
tan bark, deeply cracked and seamed; burnished ridges
slid under my fingers.
Stepping away I’d lean far back, follow
the tapering cone to its
peak, confident in its aspirations beyond
the second-growth Doug firs
which danced in the wind before my child eyes.
Nearly four years after the sale, no sign
of habitation; instead, moss
bunches across the lower patio, ivy crawls
up the brick fireplace,
spirea and azalea and rhododendron branches careen
and sag like burst fireworks,
Dad’s apple trees, unpruned and unharvested,
grow into each other,
a spindly web, and gray scale and moss
creep on the trunks while
the house settles behind its white gray paint
like Miss Havisham’s wedding
dress. Worse than any teardown or makeover,
a blight that rots
our generations of care, mocks our husbandry,
my parents’ years of planting, my years of fertilizing
and weeding and trimming.
Our shrubs zoom unchecked, indifferent to new
owners who ignore
the old story except for the most valuable tree,
far north green candle,
Sequoia sempervirens. They pay a logger who fells
it and companion firs
whose rounds settle in ivy, jumble of giant
discs quietly decomposing,
unused like the house. My rage churns my stomach,
I struggle
to inhabit the mindset that destroys tree truth,
that reduces tall life
to cast off clumps beyond hands or heart,
“the slow smokeless burning of decay.”
O. Alan Weltzien, an aging English professor in Montana (USA), has published dozens of articles, two chapbooks, and nine books including three poetry collections, the most recent of which is “Rembrandt In The Stairwell” (2016). Weltzien still loves to ski, scramble peaks and backpack, and travel internationally.
To return to Issue I, please follow this link.
