MAY 10, 2020 – Yesterday was Mom’s Day, so I couldn’t much talk about Dad, who’d died a decade ago yesterday.
For the first year after his death, I dreamt about him every single night. Then, consistent with the tradition of so many cultures, my one-year of mourning was completed. Dad’s nightly appearance in my dreams ended. He’s since made many returns, but they are sporadic and less clear than during that first year.
Likewise, in my waking hours I thought of Dad every single day during that first year. I still think of him a lot but not with the same tearful sense of loss. The hole created in the forest canopy when an old pine falls is filled by time and the surrounding trees. As the fallen log gathers moss and woodland detritus from an endless cycle of seasons, the tree’s long-lived influence fades.
But the tree doesn’t fade so much as it becomes the very soil that with sun and rain had nurtured the tree for so many decades. The life of the forest isn’t measured by the lifetime of a single tree. It’s the cycle of many trees, lives intertwined with the elements and in the light of day and shade of night.
The other day in the course of my Garage Clean-up Project, I encountered (among a million other things), Dad’s old, metal toolbox with “NILSSON” stenciled across the top. I remember it from my very earliest days. Inside it Dad stored very neatly some of his finer tools—calipers, special fasteners, a set of small screwdrivers—and other odds and ends. When I opened it this time around, I took closer inventory.
At the very bottom I found a French coin, a 25-centime piece. As I rubbed my thumb over the raised lettering of Egalité, Liberté, Fraternité that encircled one side, I wondered how in the world that coin had wound up in Dad’s toolbox. He’d never been to France. How had he acquired the coin? When had he placed it there and why?
I searched for a date but found none—unless it was hidden under a smudge of grease. With a touch of solvent on a rag, I rubbed the coin clean, and the date emerged—1903.
The coin’s probable provenance then came to mind. Grandpa had been to France! He’d spent formative time there in the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. Given the date of the coin, surely Grandpa had brought it back among his souvenirs. From his uniform pocket to a dresser top, perhaps, to a small dish of coins on a shelf, to Dad’s childhood collection, to his dresser top, to his coin dish on the shelf, to . . . that toolbox.
As I leaned over metal box and fingered the coin, I thought of Dad and Grandpa together—two of the tallest pines in my family’s part of the forest. Now long gone, their influence left the soil around them as rich as can be.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
