When my father was in hospital that year he later died, I often sat with him at his bedside reading Emily Carr’s Growing Pains. Or maybe it was The House of All Sorts. Or possibly The Book of Small. Some things are vague from this time. But I do remember it was Emily Carr. And I remember my father’s hands, so strangely still above the sheets (I don’t remember the colour of the sheets, only how they contrasted with the ruddy tan of his skin) and I sometimes paused in my reading to look at them as he slept, remembering how all through my childhood they held a hammer, a saw, magically transforming various shapes of wood into things, into furniture, all while I watched from a high wooden stool beside his workbench. Sitting beside him felt natural and for the first time in my life I reach out to touch these familiar hands and this wakes him. I hadn’t meant to wake him and my immediate instinct is to pull away (we’ve never been a family of hand holders and I don’t want to embarrass him) but before I can move, his fingers wrap around mine, weakly, but insistent enough to hold me there. His eyes remain closed. I pick up my book, with the other hand now, continue reading.

Here is a picture of his feet. I don’t have one of his hands.

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A story for spring that begins like this will continue every other day or so; an exercise in free-writing to amuse myself in these giddy days of snow melt.

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