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Today was so strange - surreal. WMBM and I left home in the dark to arrive at "509" in Brisbane just after dawn - only just ahead of the removalist's trucks. Traumatic. Sad. Ecstatic. Numbing. Exciting. Relief. Overwhelming grief and some things that may be family legend in about a week. Mum and Dad finally moving after nearly 40 years in our "family home". So today I "rubbed" my father's shed. Not the big shed, but the little shed within the mighty shed that held his bits and pieces for more than half his life - the two of us stood in the sacred place together for the last time. Just us. Holding hands. Neither of us really knowing what to do with his precious things. The dumpster skip waiting just down the paddock a little bit. I found his old saw, then packet of something so old it probably didn't keep things as dry as it said on the tin. Found a file I used to clean the horses hooves with - that nearly sent him into orbit back in the 70s because we blunted them and left them out and never put his "stuff" away - even when he locked it we found the key and used his precious chisels anyway.I rubbed the top of the rusted tool box, and one or two things still in use from his 21st birthday ..... the rusted squares, bibs and bobs. Then the deck from the top house, the tree trunks from Mum's plantings four decades ago, pipes, vines and old tiles. Tonight, at home, it is time to smile - looking at the folds of shiva'd fabric and know that I will always have a piece of my father's shed.
This is the place where in 1959, someone (and definitely not my parent's!) bought a clothesline and scribbled into the wet concrete "Happy Mother's Day". No one in our family would have survived such a thing. The words are now worn away ... but the place where the Hills Hoist once stood is forever "gold".
Star pickets and galv pipes will always remind me of "509". Rubbed the concrete steps at the "top house" and timbers from the deck. Then a sleeper bench he made in the garden ....
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Today was so strange - surreal. WMBM and I left home in the dark to arrive at "509" in Brisbane just after dawn - only just ahead of the removalist's trucks. Traumatic. Sad. Ecstatic. Numbing. Exciting. Relief. Overwhelming grief and some things that may be family legend in about a week. Mum and Dad finally moving after nearly 40 years in our "family home". So today I "rubbed" my father's shed. Not the big shed, but the little shed within the mighty shed that held his bits and pieces for more than half his life - the two of us stood in the sacred place together for the last time. Just us. Holding hands. Neither of us really knowing what to do with his precious things. The dumpster skip waiting just down the paddock a little bit. I found his old saw, then packet of something so old it probably didn't keep things as dry as it said on the tin. Found a file I used to clean the horses hooves with - that nearly sent him into orbit back in the 70s because we blunted them and left them out and never put his "stuff" away - even when he locked it we found the key and used his precious chisels anyway.I rubbed the top of the rusted tool box, and one or two things still in use from his 21st birthday ..... the rusted squares, bibs and bobs. Then the deck from the top house, the tree trunks from Mum's plantings four decades ago, pipes, vines and old tiles. Tonight, at home, it is time to smile - looking at the folds of shiva'd fabric and know that I will always have a piece of my father's shed. 
2 comments:
A shed is indeed a sacred place for men. My Uncles shed was/is still a shrine to imperial nuts and bolts. Pieces of "just in case". My Panda's shed is similarly strewn with things that are deemed "still good" and just need "A bit to fix". The shrine to the small god Gunnadoo.
Some lovely memories in those rubbings Ali.
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