When my dad, Everett Woodman, was alive, he would usher in the month of June with a predictable routine. “Don’t forget,” he would say, stomping around the house. “Don’t forget what’s coming up two weeks from Sunday. Fahther’s Day.” (He could dial his New Hampshire accent up or down as required.)
“Fahther’s Very Day. Do you suppose there will be any tangible evidence of affection?” Well! We were put on notice! Fahther’s Very Day was not to be ignored. My dad has been dead now for 19 years, and I’m channeling him. He ate toast with both butter and peanut butter on it. When he was alive, I found that mixture disgusting, but now I think it’s delicious.
He had a distinguished career in education, but what my sisters and I remember him for had little to do with his professional accomplishments. We loved his homemade slang. A “mucket” meant either a hat or a beer. A “pelican” meant a dollar. The microwave oven was the “rototiller,” because the plate inside went round and round.
My family identified itself as Unitarian (later, Unitarian Universalist), and our religious education was a homemade affair, mostly my dad’s opinions. Nonetheless, somehow we knew the Lord’s Prayer. Did we learn it at home? Or at school? I don’t remember.
One thing we did learn from our dad was basic gardening skills. My father was an avid gardener. Every year, after much study, he would order seeds from the Burpee catalog and start his plants in the basement under grow lights. When the sprouts popped up, he moved them to the sun porch. As the days grew warmer, he spaded the soil and worked in manure with the (real) rototiller. After marking off the rows with string, he put in the seedlings.
All summer long, we ate out of the garden. Early harvests of spinach and radishes and lettuce. Midsummer rounds of — you guessed it — zucchini. Corn, picked when the water was boiling on the stove. “Pahsnips.” We all put in many involuntary hours of weeding and thinning and harvesting and we ate more Swiss chard than we preferred.
As my dad aged, it grew harder for him to tend his garden. The cranky old rototiller rattled his fragile, arthritic skeleton. But still the sink was full of greens ready for rinsing and the refrigerator was stocked with bowls of radishes in ice water.
“Have some more Swiss chard!” was his incantation.
It was partly in tribute, partly in revolt against Swiss chard that my sister Lee Woodman cross-stitched a sampler, which promptly went up to a place of honor on the wall above his desk. The prayer on the sampler went:
Our father which art in the mulch pile
Hallowed be thy Brussels sprouts
Thy corn has come, thy will was done
On earth as it was in the sun porch
Give us this day our daily tomates
But deliver us from Swiss chard
For thine is the most glorious green thumb ever
Amen
A poem of Lee’s published in Vox Poetica on May 10, 2018, combines lines of her original sampler with other memories of our dad.
…
He was proud of his fruits and roots,
sweet “bluebs” and rutabagas—
He’d plea with us to weed with him;
I’d skitter off after two hard tugs.
Although he could rototill no more,
he’d stoop with aching joints and pull,
Shaking loose rich mulch from carrots,
praising lush abundant squash.
…
He confessed once before he died that
he and Mom recited the Lord’s Prayer,
every night holding hands in bed,
tending the earth again under starry sky.
Beneath those beets and lettuce leaves,
he planted his brand of bountiful faith I sent a joyful message skyward,
sailing right past pews of red zinnias:
For thine is the power and the most glorious green
thumb forever . . . Amen.
The poem was a tender tribute to our dad, a mixture of the religious and the irreverent.
So on this Father’s Day, I thank my sister, and I also thank my dad. For his Brussels Sprouts and even for the dreaded Swiss chard, which I now love, with its taste of the earth.
For his planting and weeding and picking, which showed us about work and process and faith in nature. For his delight in compost and seedlings, which showed us where growing things come from.
I doubt that my dad and mom really recited the Lord’s Prayer every night, especially when they fell asleep over the baseball game. Yet, this idea of them together brings a lump to my throat: two specks in the universe, connected to generations of other specks, holding hands and saying the familiar words before they slept.
Betsy Woodman, now residing in New York, lived in New London, Sutton, Andover and Concord. Her father was born in Franklin and was the president of Colby-Sawyer College from 1962 ro 1972.