Tag Archives: fathers and daughters

Father/Daughter Discourse

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Dear Daughter:

Your frenetic new admirer is not my cup of tea,
for even though I told him that he’d have to let you be,
he resorts to tactics like climbing that big tree
to gain visual access to our property.

You, too, must be incisive in telling him to cease
if you’d like his constant efforts to come to a surcease.
For though I am your father, he allots to me no power
but simply remains stubbornly in his leafy bower.

His persistent efforts prove that he is from that faction
that they label OCD, for he shows no reaction
to my constant pleas, so do you agree with me
that it’s necessary to just cut down the tree?

Dear Papa:

Alas, though my new suitor is not your cup of tea,
I find that his flavor is agreeable to me.
I am not your teenage daughter, for I’m almost thirty-three.
So please do not molest him, and do not cut down his tree.

It is a fact, dear parent, I’m of marriageable age.
So cease with your obsession and curb parental rage.
It’s time to cut the apron strings and set your daughter free,
for I prefer another perch to my father’s knee!

 

Prompt words are frenetic, incisive, faction, allot, and almost.

Sue Bee Honey: Wordle 538, Jan 30, 2022

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Sue Bee Honey

Once a year, their trucks would leave trails through our fields of sweet clover and my father returned from the fields with  combs of honey still in their wooden frames, dripping rich streams that blackened the dust of  the sidewalk between the back driveway and the porch, where he propped them up against the porch railing to drain into huge clay bowls.

Sue Bee Honey, rich and golden and speckled with tiny corpses of the bees who made it. Those two purloined combs were the price he exacted for allowing them to put their hives onto our land. I swear I could smell that honey on the wind long before he brought it back to share with the family—our year’s supply that we would filter through screens to remove broken bits of wax and bee bodies and pour into bottles to line a foot-long space on the narrow shelves of the pantry.

I remember breaking off a piece of the broken comb to chew like sugared gum—sweet July memories of summer as well as later memories of the silken feel of that honey trailed onto hot buttered corn muffins in the morning. It solved my winter hunger for sweet and fueled me up for a morning of  books and chalkboards and sharpened pencils on blue-lined rough yellow paper.

 

The prompt words  for  The Sunday Whirl, Wordle 538 are: broken silk dust leaving truck family sign hunger wind books honey and black. Two of the images are by  Alisa Reutova and Mariana Ibanez  on Unsplash.

Dad’s Makeover

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Dad’s Makeover

OMG, you guys.  Daddy slept all morning so I made a fast run to the house to find his reading glasses and pick up some clean underwear.  Hold onto your hats, because I have big news. Our old Dad has really cleaned up his act!  He got rid of all the empty paper bags and National Geographics. There is space between objects in the refrigerator. You can see the hall walls again. No countless stacks of empty jelly glasses and yogurt cups.  No drawers full of used twist ties and rubber bands streaked with carbon from newspapers thrown twenty years ago.

All of the flowerpots with dry cracked soil and the ossified skeletons of plants? Gone, along with their friends the stacks of empty pizza boxes and  six packs of beer bottles.No cupboard full of clam chowder.  No year’s supply of ketchup stockpiled in the pantry. In the bathroom drawer, just one tube of toothpaste squeezed from the end. No ranks of out-of-date prescription bottles.  No shriveled tubes of Preparation H.

Mama’s clothes are finally gone from the closet. Her dusty doilies, vanished from every surface in the house. No mismatched socks and wrenches in his bedroom drawers.

How did this come about? Impossible to say as he still hasn’t come to after his surgery, but if I were to assay the probabilities, I’d say a woman might be involved.  There is a vase of flowers in his hospital room and a container of homemade soup in the little fridge beside his bed.  His hair looks newly cut and his nostril hairs are not in evidence.  All presentable underwear in the valise  I packed for him and sis, his jockeys are in shades of maroon, navy blue and rust brown!!!  No more untidy whities.  No more undershirts with holes in them. It’s like they operated on his whole life, not just his appendix.  Removed every dusty, tattered, useless, outgrown part of him and plopped down a new father in his place.

Oops.. gotta run soon.  The nurse just said he has another visitor. Not a family member, but the one who admitted him to the hospital last night at midnight. The one who left the key to his house for me.  They say only one visitor at a time, so guess I’ll have to leave when she gets here.  Door opening. She’s coming in the door! I’ll call you from the car.

(After a ten minute lapse, the phone rings again.)

Okay. You guys? Are you all there?  Sit down, will you? All sitting down? A slight modification. Make that a he who came in the door!

The prompt word today is assay.