The Wheelbarrow

"Dad worked harder than I gave him credit for."

How many times have you heard someone say that about a father that has passed on? You bet. It’s a common refrain, along with, “I have no idea how he managed to juggle all those responsibilities.” Or something like that. Or maybe it’s about a mom. In my case, I knew how hard Mum worked, and I honored her for it all the time. But Dad and I were like oil and water until Mum died, and I closed my mind and heart to his work ethic.

Mum died when I was 17, and for five, all-too-brief years, Dad and I enjoyed a close relationship. If I’d realized I’d lose him—emotionally—again, perhaps I would have cherished that time even more than I did, but I was still young, immature, and in my own world of exploration. When I woke up to what was happening with him, we were like oil and water once more. Well, it would be more accurate to say we were like gasoline and fire.

For the next six years, I put a half-world’s distance between us. Given time, distance, and good counsel, the chemistry between us changed again. We never recovered the emotional closeness of my early twenties, but the volatility was put to rest. Uneasiness remained over the decades, as his second bride attempted hospitality with us for a time, became hostile for a time, and cycled back to being hospitable, and then to the hostility. Eggshells were the path of our relationship for almost three decades.

Oddly enough, she had an undeniable work ethic, too. And for as long as she and my father were together, I know that her adoration of him drove her to keep him as healthy as possible. I have said for years that she is the reason, humanly speaking, that he lived as long as he did. When they met, he was in his mid-fifties, standing 5’10”, weighing about 350 pounds, and he was pre-diabetic. She helped him lose 150 pounds by changing his eating habits and walking daily, successfully preventing him from diabetic medication for many years.

Together, they cleaned up the dooryard that had been littered with the detritus of farm life for twenty-five years: stacks of lumber, felled trees, firewood, old haying equipment, deceased vehicles, a collapsed garage, and other signs of disordered materials. They repainted the farmhouse. The barn was completed, with lean-tos added on each side to house tractors, balers, and the farm truck. The exterior was painted bright red with white trim. They renovated unused space in the house to become a family room that included a large picture window facing the western sky. An upstairs bedroom that had never been finished was painted and turned into Dad’s library. A small bed was added for overnight guests.

At first, I begrudged the success she had getting all that work done because of how much Dad praised her for doing it. He once told me that, with her he was “the happiest I’ve ever been.” It seemed like such a betrayal to me that he could say that of a woman who was not my mother, and who made no secret of not wanting to have a warm relationship with me at all. I became bitter for a time until I realized that my bitterness was hurting me, not them. Also, I matured enough to understand that Dad had fulfilled his wedding vows to my Mum already: He had been faithful to her as he had promised, “Till death us do part.”

When death parted them, he wasn’t married to her anymore. I began to understand that when he was a widower, he was lonely. He sought counsel about remarrying, and when he understood that with a new wife, he wouldn’t be betraying his first wife in any way at all, he felt free to pursue remarriage. Naturally, though, I didn’t work through all that before he got remarried, and when he said his second wife made him happier than he’d ever been before, I was upset. Something else that calmed me down was realizing that he retired from teaching just a couple of years after remarrying. All of his five children were married or out of college by then. He wasn’t worried about providing for a young family. Life was just his wife and him. With so little on his mind, it was natural for him to be so happy.

As the years slipped by and our relationship thawed into its lasting, uneasy peace, I looked for ways to include Dad in our lives. To his credit, he responded to invitations to attend school and sports events that my kids were doing. They loved visiting Grandpa’s farm, though cat allergies became an issue for one of my boys. They loved Grandpa. I loved that they loved him, and he them.

We lived about thirty-five minutes from Grandpa’s house, where I grew up. It’s not on our way to anywhere else, really. I sometimes take a minor detour on my way home from work and “swing by the house.” I used to do that with a bit of regularity, and “swinging by the house” included stopping in to see Dad, but he’s gone now. He died in 2021. His wife made it clear that she and I don’t need to have anything to do with each other, so I don’t. I still give her credit for keeping him alive and active for as long as he was—he kept going till age 88—but she never believed that Dad’s kids loved him as we did or that we were willing to love her, too. Still, every three or four months, I take that detour and “swing by the house” to see if anything has changed. It was my childhood home, after all.

Back in 2020, I was driving to work one morning, and due to the COVID-19 pandemic I’d started using a different route for my morning commute. It involved less traffic, so it was more calming. Based on the day of the week, which was a Tuesday, I knew the town through which I was passing had trash pickup scheduled, and as I crested a small hill, I saw a wide-bodied wheelbarrow with fat rubber tires sitting at the end of a driveway with two trashcans inside it. In the instant that I saw that wheelbarrow with the rubber tires, my mind ran a memory from 38 years earlier, and tears sprang into my eyes.

Dad was a high school English teacher. He would come home from school each day, change his clothes, and call on his two sons to join him for chores. Chores would include chopping and/or stacking and/or moving firewood, haying, collecting sap to boil down to syrup, feeding the chickens & collecting their eggs, mowing the lawn, weeding the garden, and whatever else needed doing. I saw how my friends and neighbors had wheelbarrows with rubber tires to help them move materials more easily around their yards, so I began to complain and whine about needing a wheelbarrow. Sadly, whining and complaining were my common forms of communication with Dad.

About a week later, Dad called me outside on a Saturday and presented me with a wooden wheelbarrow. He had built it! The sides were removable for loads that wouldn’t fit in the standard size. It was remarkable. I looked at the wheel: Flat iron. “Rubber’s too expensive. Just push a little harder and it’ll work fine.” I almost never used the wheelbarrow he’d made just for me. That’s the shame that flooded my thoughts 38 years later and filled my eyes with tears.

It was such a small thing to see that wheelbarrow that November 2020 morning, yet it reminded me of my ingratitude to the man that worked so hard to help me succeed in life. He was always working, it seemed, yet I never gave him the credit I owed to him. That day, when I left work, I swung by the house and told him about it. I thanked him for all his hard work on my behalf, apologized for my ingratitude, sought his forgiveness, and told him how much I loved him. “I forgive you, son. I love you, too.” Our eyes got a bit misty. I hugged him. He wasn't the hugger Mum was, but he was getting one, anyway.

He didn’t remember the wheelbarrow, by the way. Something so trivial for him taught me gratitude. I owed him that much. Fragile relationship or not, I knew Dad loved me, and I wasn't going to let anyone prevent us from expressing that to each other.

As things turned out, it was the last time I saw Dad. Less than two weeks later, my workplace was infested with COVID and remained on lockdown for the entire month of December. Knowing the frailty of Dad's immunity, I didn't "swing by the house" during the winter months. I was getting ready to resume the practice in the spring when I received word that his final days had arrived.

A small thing to see a wheelbarrow, a pivotal moment in this man's life.