Petals of gold at the brewery

These waters, they stir me.  Across from Thunder Island I stand remembering. As the water boils below so does my memory, full of clips of my father. His hands teaching me to tie on bait. “twist it five times at least before you pull the tail through, then pull it tight in your teeth”. His fingers were stubby and without a spot  uncalloused. He trimmed his nails by sliding his pocket knife over the edges, shaving off the overhang. He was a craftsman, a artist in wood. I see us in my childhood, two silhouettes on a boat, setting the sun on our backs, casting the waters by. On the dark morning drives out to fishing up near the locks I would pretend to be asleep and listen to him sing along with Alan Jackson and whistle the words he didn’t know. Most people who know my family assume that I get my singing voice from my mom but they have just never heard my dad sing.  He had a beautiful  cowboy voice.  When I was nine I called into the local country radio station and dedicated a song to my dad, “I shoulda been a cowboy”. The truth was that what my dad shared in common with cowboys was really only the boots he wore but in my nine year old mind cowboys were heroes, standing for protection of their families, providing for them through sweat and blood,  sacrificing for moral gain, he was that kind of cowboy.  Give you the shirt off his back kind of man and oh how I loved him. I loved him in the way that all daughters hope to get to love their daddies. The kind where every ounce of affection that spills out from the little girl is returned in full and with gains from a man who calls her beautiful and smart and who disciplines scattering wisdom in her heart, who tells her just how proud and why, who teaches her about his own love for Jesus not requiring that she does the same but offers it as a shining road that she alone must choose to take or to not. I grasp at these memories of him, I  flounder for them like they are flower petals draining with the bath water, running down the drain, the recession quickening and swirling out of my grasp as the waters lower. When the water is gone only a few petals will remain clinging to the sides of my memory. So I scribble fast these memories of gold hoping they can be pressed between pages, dried for future looking and handling. Even though they will be old and cracked and barely resemble the supple life filled things they were before, I will still have them and they are so very dear to me, these petals of gold.