Although I am excited to begin a new project: redecorating my guest bathroom, I find myself weeping as I strip the wallpaper. This is the wallpaper that my parents, working so well together as a team (as they always did), lovingly put on the walls as I went off to work and did my busy, mindless things. Staying for several weeks in my then-new-to-me house, they painted, they repaired sticky cabinets and doors, they cleaned ceiling fans, they chatted up the guys who put in the chain link fence and the guys who laid the ceramic tile. They hauled brush and trash out of the back yard. They got to know my neighbors better than I did. My mother cooked dinner for us, did our laundry. My father cut down trees in my overgrown yard and installed gutters on the house, making countless trips to the small, local hardware store for whatever he needed. Of course, he was on a first-name basis with all the personnel there before he and my mother packed up and left for their home in upstate New York. So, as I peel the wallpaper, and as I see each carefully cut and pasted patch, and each meticulously matched strip of paper--seams and minute pieces I had never noticed before--I am so very sad that my father is no longer with us and that my mother is aging so frightfully. But I am so grateful, so very grateful, for their constant, deep, and steady love for me. Every child should be so lucky.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 00:25:00 +0000
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