Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: RESTORATION (12/03/20)
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TITLE: Thatched Roof | Previous Challenge Entry
By Corinne Smelker
12/10/20 -
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I dropped to my knees and then sat down as I surveyed the room. I was nine the last time I had seen the majority of items stored here, and memories flashed a fin briefly before flitting off, and then back again. There was her easel – that’s right – she had painted; there was her tea cup; and there, in the corner, covered in goodness knows what was my old bicycle, the one she had run behind laughing the first time I’d ridden without training wheels.
A scratching noise distracted me and I looked up. I tucked my head down quickly enough to prevent a mouthful of detritus, but my scalp and shoulders weren’t so lucky. Old thatch reeds, broken down by weather, by age and sheer neglect lay scattered around me – a testament to the sheer amount of work I had before me to even try to put this old house to rights. I stood and brushed the stalks, the dirt and probably the skeletons of a thousand insects off me.
Footsteps echoed on the stairs leading to the room. I didn’t turn around, I knew it was my father. He was the reason this house, her house, was in such disrepair. A hand landed on my shoulder but I shrugged it away before wheeling around to face him. “How could you do this? How could you hide all of her things away?”
“Son…”
“Don’t. You don’t get to call me son. Not after all of this! You sent me away to boarding school after she died. I was HER son, not yours! You only saw me at holidays and that was only because we all stayed at mom and pop’s.”
I strode away, down the stairs and out to the back garden and its breathtaking view of the lake and in the background, the magnificent snowcapped mountain peaks. As I breathed in the warm summer air I became, once again, aware of my father’s presence.
“Please Alex, I am trying to explain. Please hear me out.”
I turned, reluctantly, to face him.
“She was the love of my life, your mother. The night of the accident I thought I’d lost you both, and perhaps, in a way, I did. I got the call that you were both in the ER, and when I arrived there I was too late to say goodbye to her, and you were in that coma. When you recovered everything was already done – and I didn’t know what to do. I could barely cope, you would be too young to know, but I was in a drunken stupor most of the time. I did what I thought was best.”
Tears dripped freely down his cheeks and I realized this was the first time I had ever seen him cry.
“She was the love of my life,” he repeated.
“She was mine too,” I said. “But you stole her memories from me. Why did you put everything of hers away in this old house?”
He looked at the house as though seeing it for the first time, “Because it was hers. I couldn’t bear to come back. Your grandfather packed all of her things for me and it’s been waiting for us to return. Are you going to sell it, or keep it?”
I surveyed the house with its peeling exterior paint, the tumbledown thatched roof, the jungle of weeds that crowded the walls and sighed. “It’s our home, dad, for better or for worse. We’re both inextricably tied to this place. How good are you at fixing thatch and painting?”
As we strolled back towards our home, talking contractors, repairs, and what tools we needed to buy, I realized that for the first time since mom’s death I had called my father, ‘dad’.
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