| When I was seven... |
| By T Campbell |
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http://www.tcampbell.net |
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When I was seven, it snowed. Snow was a rarity in our Southern beach town, and I gaped at the way it transformed the landscape, its steady, orderly descent turning grass and pavement and cobblestones to monochrome. |
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Dad was out of the house in the afternoon, sawing firewood. |
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(With slightly greater difficulty, twenty-three years later, he would chainsaw two bottoms off the Christmas tree. My brother and I would help, but the privilege of beginning and ending the task, and the unspoken credit for it, would remain his.) |
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I barely glimpsed him working that white day. I had a snowman to build, a snowball fight to pick and a new, wide, wonderful tundra through which my |
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...when his work was done, and he had brought in the wood without ceremony, and the fire was licking and cracking and sparking from the products of his labor, I knew then, as I have known few times since, what it was to be a man. |
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Two years later, we bought a heater. Five years later, we cleared most of the brush in the backyard. My father never cut firewood again. |
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