Nine years without my dad

Nine years without my remarkable dad. I'm really feeling his absence this year. Some years you can kind of more or less get on with things, but this year I have really craved his metaphysical input. And I do receive it, in moments when I am open and quiet and least expect it.

What an immense privilege those years were, when my brothers visited the farm and we all sat around the dining table, eating homemade pasta and drinking wine. Or the memory that floored me a week or so ago of my dad kneeling down with me on the beach in South Carolina to teach me how to make a drip castle out of wet sand. I must have stacked a hundred cubes of wood with him, starting when I was a little girl in Ulen, those neat factory cut pieces of wood he brought home from the manufacturing plant.

I can still conjure his very human presence in my mind, his warmth and humour and unique way of being. I can hear his voice and see his face. I see him in my brothers, in my sister, in the crook of my nose. I feel him best on the farm, in the rare hot northwest wind blowing through the fields. I feel him at the perimeter, watching over my mom. I feel him in open spaces, on beaches and mudflats and the ocean surrounding any boat. Sometimes I feel him underwater just behind me, wanting to see what I see.

Love and miss you Da.