My dad would come in after loading his truck, hang up his cap and start moving couches and tables. We’d drop the funnies or click off the Sunday movie, willing to do what we usually hated. He seemed to love this, and whistled through his teeth, his huge frame creaking the stairs as we hoisted summer rugs to the attic then unrolled thicker carpets saved for now, when the sky through my mom’s starched curtains blurred chilled silver. A vacuum purred in one room, a mop slopped linoleum in another and then, the first Christmas song from the radio. Around six, we’d wax ourselves into the parlor, six of us huddling like pilgrims. My father would sit with my mother, stretch out his legs, and speak of being a boy in this house his parents built with money they earned in Ireland. My dad, whose truck took him miles away on Jersey highways, lived these minutes with only us, telling of Depression meals of corn flakes and fish and borrowing coal from neighbors in leaner Novembers. And I, his youngest, would sit before him giggling as his thick toes tickled my feet. And when my mother announced fruit cup and shrimp cocktail, and three vegetables with a twenty-five-pound turkey, and apple crumb pie, he’d lean back and grin with his eyes closed as our new furnace pumped heat through the baseboards, across the spotless floors, and into our soap-sweet air.
This poem is from Edwin Romond’s Home Fire (Belle Mead Press). It previously appeared in the Pittsburgh Quarterly.
— Ed.
