Navigating Novelty in anticlimatic

On the bedside table in my room at the family cabin is a photograph of my dad standing, shirtless, in front of his newly minted pond. The rocks are all clean and orderly, and on the porch just beside it are two wooden chairs that I recognize. They haunt numerous family photos, in several different locations, built at one point in time by my dad’s dad, and covered in a thick shiny lacquer. Like the newly minted pond, the chairs still shone with that yellowy orange glow of “good” wood.

The rocks ‘round the pond are no longer clean and orderly, but buried beneath elephant ears, ferns, and long grass. Nor are they even, or anything but a dirty stubbled black. As recently as a few years ago, there was only one of the two chairs left. The wood had gone grey, and completely exposed to the weather. It sat alone on the far side of the house, where no one occupied it, and there it sat slowly shriveling. My Dad seemed to have gotten what he needed out of it, and let it go.

Sometime last year it disappeared completely. Not sure to where. It was either he, or my ma, that disposed of it one way or another. I suspect he burned it. And just when the last remnant of anything his father had built, owned, or left him was gone, he went as well- leaving his own collection of crafts behind for us. More of them, and better built, but no more impervious to the slow roll of time as anything else.

I sit here considering it, and I get where he was coming from maybe. If there came a day when I said goodbye to the last tangible remnant of him, for me, outside of what my fickle decaying memory might possess, I’d feel compelled to take my leave too.