Cleaning Dad's Garage For The Last Time
A Meditation, An Elegy
It was just a task on a long list of items, helping my Mom get ready to move. I started the job inside that rote task-oriented mindset: just another thing to get done. Until the finality of it hit. Here was an end point. I would be closing the book on a life lived. The thought billowed up until it crowded out everything else. This was an ending. And endings by nature do not have to be bad things. Most simply drop a pin on the timeline from which some other beginning picks up and carries us along. But then there are those moments, scenes, and events, that do not lead to a next moment, scene, or event. They stand outside the continuum; an end point, full stop. This was that.
* * *
I started at the inside front-left corner and would wind counter-clockwise around to the front-right corner. A stand-alone structure, the garage stood just a few paces in front of, and to one side of my folks’ retirement house, itself mobile home in material if fixed in place, not going anywhere. There was no sparing of amenities. It was spacious and comfortable inside. It could seem a very impermanent structure from outside but for its going on thirty-year tenure: one in a community of dozens of cul-de-sacs of the same, the community itself one of dozens of the same along a busy strip of Route 41 in southwest Florida. The house and garage had been re-roofed in advance of putting it on the market, this having left the garage a mess. That, plus, Dad had been absent his tending duties since 2007, most outdoor work, the garage—his space, his zen—nothing my Mom had cared too much for past or present.
I was making progress down the left-hand wall when I snapped to long enough to realize I had not been cleaning overhead first, having started with an automatic sweeping of the floor. Shingle bits, years of wind-blown leaves and dried grass, your average neglect, forced me to slide back to left-front corner, long broom in hand. I started over with the high up wall niches and shelving littered of the mentioned debris, cobwebs, etc. Be thorough in what you did. Dad taught me that. Dad was in just about everything I did. That was not always a good thing. Dad was too reliant on “the system,” a bit too “company line” for my wandering daydreaming ways. But many things in life just need to be done; and for that, Dad’s guidance was training without equal. It was certainly the most important thing right then and the most obvious; for it was immediately apparent: Dad was all around me.
Nearly fifteen years had come and gone since he had been suddenly removed from my expected day-to-day outline, the day-to-day routine of this place in North Fort Myers, Florida. Along the left-hand wall and just beyond the recycling bins was a trove of old-school tools, some of which I recognized from their place along the inside left-hand wall (for real) of the attached garage of my growing-up house in Connecticut—where Dad truly tended the land. Here they were in my present, again. Dad, long past, present again.
Some of the tools by look alone had to have been handed down by my grandfather, my Dad’s dad also a prodigious outdoor worker (and woodworker and top-shelf gardener, for that matter). It was in the genes, the outdoor work-in-the-yard thing. Grandpa and Dad both kept pristine yards, a model for routine upkeep of house and property. I had, and still do aim for the same, if tempered by my supplemental Gen X training that could not help but sniff out suburban banality and time blown on the formal upkeep of appearances with a sneer; of course, that before so many of my generation—myself front and center—resolved upon our own version of the same, the sneer having eased in realizing the settling power of place and home.
And the tools: solid wood shafts, all metal, no lack of craftsmanship in their construction, though certainly mass-produced. A metal rake that was still as functional as the one I had back at my house, but with 30-40+ years of age over my “new” (c. late 1990s) metal rake. Another smaller metal rake, more a long-handled garden rake with only four teeth. An array of modern-bought tools framed the most unique: an edger, a half circle of solid sharpened steel, with heel-lip for pressing down with force in making the precise cuts it was designed for. A so simple, but effective tool that I would never have need for. (Again, I only aim for that pristine ideal.) Still, I would eventually take it and the two metal rakes with me when the big move came the following Spring. They all seemed historic, personally important. How so much of our material stuff will outlive us, and by decades, longer than human lifetimes. Stored correctly—as in along the inside left-hand wall of a well-tended garage—these tools would easily outlive me, as they did Dad and Grandpa. I could only hope their future had them hanging in the garage or shed of one of my nephews, if only to keep the string alive. Three implements, unconcerned with time or the concept of a fleeting mortality, if embodying those mortals who bought and used them. A simple purpose so specific. That so much of our material stuff lives on beyond us, and yet does so as the lingering outline of us. Two metal rakes and an edger: functional, reliable. I do not think I could have scripted a profile from scratch that better captured Dad’s time on this Earth: a tender of things, a maintainer of things, precise and dutiful in the role.
Within a few months of Dad having died, my brother had taken it on himself to visit with the express intent of clearing out the garage. This would have been too much for Mom, and not necessarily for its emotional impact, but for the sheer scope of the task. Dad’s workbenches had always been, let’s say: comprehensive. Even in retirement, this was a point of emphasis: to be prepared for anything. And with my brother performing this much lauded clearing out, most of Dad’s overtly detailed, dutifully labeled, often redundant if abundantly prepared command-and-control center along the back wall had been left mostly bare. Gone were the half-dozen different sizes of finishing nail each in their specific slide-in cubby, varying gauge of bolt by which to attach anything to anything else than had been constructed over the previous half-century, and wire nuts enough to repair all household lamps from the Keys to Sarasota. All of the paint cans and the ubiquitous stains (“touching up” Dad’s life-long obsession), the back-up collections of twist / zip-ties, all of it had been cleared out. Of all the things mentioned, only the occasional label or note was left scattered throughout the inside of the garage.
It was in and around those hanging tools, those dutiful sentries, that I spotted the first of the few that remained. But rather than breezing a mind wandering nostalgically, this one stopped me cold. I will not claim it under oath, but I think I felt sharp physical pain in the act of noticing. Above the sprinkling system console was a series of dates written on a post-it note. Dutifully, of course, Dad had documented each watering across the tail end of 2006 into early 2007, the note stilled at that point in time. Just from the notation I could tell that late 2006 had witnessed plenty of rainfall, only a few dates listed starting in October. (Though I must note that 10/22 and 11/11 were both watering days and coincide with, respectively, my wife’s birthday and our anniversary. Kind of have to believe both were on purpose.) But then, the weather clearly shifts in January of 2007, as weekly waterings were required: 1/8, 1/14, 1/22, 1/31. Dutiful, reliable, he would not suffer the indignity of browning grass in Florida in the winter. . . .
And then Dad died: February 16, 2007, a massive aneurysm that erased an entire life’s archive of dutiful reliable service in an instant (that it fell two days after my birthday just spiking the sharp physical pain the news induced). But I was mostly struck by the two final dates on that post-it: 2/27 and 3/6. I can only think Dad had been plotting a future that was not to be. And I thought as I stood there, broom-in-hand, how even scratch-out notes outlive us and outline who we were, when we were, as much if not more than any visual record possibly could. A photograph only frames a visage, a glancing take on the person that was. A post-it containing maintenance tasks dating beyond that person’s mortal time-stamp? Kind of says it all, certainly about my Dad, at least. This one toss-away note, it seemed as perfect a memorial as one could have possibly conceived. And that rattled through my head, the all of it, as I continued on.
Just beyond the hanging yard tools was a stack of unused landscaping bricks. I started to sweep around them, heavy foot-by-foot tiles, before putting down the broom and moving them all out first. Yes, yes, be thorough; and as anticipated there was a mess behind, the stack having created a hidden hollow for shingle bits and old roofing nails to accumulate during the recent re-roofing. But despite the discovery of hidden caches of random years-long messes, I was making progress. Getting around, behind, and above the hot water heater in the back-left corner, I had worked my way down to the back wall and near empty workbench by about noon.
Above the trash cans, situated in their long-time place of honor alongside the hot water heater, I noticed what I had not before. Having regularly taken out the trash for Mom on visits over the past 15 years, I had never before spotted a rectangular newspaper clipping noting the county’s recycling rules: “What can go in the blue bin . . . and what can’t.” A faint trace of Dad. Being who he was—precise, prepared (often overdoing both)—of course it was dated: 7/06; which meant that as of July 2006, Dad was prepared to not run afoul the edicts of the county waste management authorities. “If you are going to do something, do it right.” I could hear the faint echo of something to that effect reverberating, still, within that most functional space, or inside my head—or both—memory and physical space fusing in narrative.
The clipped strip of newspaper was only 15 years old, though it looked of some scratched out parchment from colonial times, withering rapidly to a sere sepia tone amidst the year-round sauna that is any garage in southwest Florida. And in that instant it jumped out as symbolic of a bygone era, of Dad’s having lived and worked in this space; just that it really did seem from a lifetime ago. Since that more stark end point in February 2007, his being alive had receded by orders of magnitude in my head, far greater than the simple passing of years. His being alive could seem of a whole other epoch, as if decades had passed; though, obviously, that was not the case. And perhaps this was all just part of my processing that rip in time. We, the living, in order to keep going have to distance ourselves from the pain points of the past. . . . But then, a physical trace: a post-it note, a newspaper clipping, all that it takes for memories to again take flesh-and-blood form; a life lived, and you being the beneficiary. To clean this garage well one last time was the very least I could do. But I also knew, Dad would have held so small a thing a great honor.
I mopped away sweat. It was the first week of November 2021. But it was still hot, very hot. . . . Now I have lived my entire adult life in and about Atlanta, Georgia. I know what heat and humidity can be. But here was deep southwest Florida in a world enduring rapid planetary warm-up. The first few weeks of November would have autumn hovering cool cyan domes over the urban forests of my east side Atlanta home. I had left behind prime firepit weather to come south and help Mom with the move, and was missing it hard right then, a long sought after time of year in Atlanta. I cannot see that prime firepit weather ever visited this far south anymore. The last family Christmas gathering that we had in Florida was 2018. Daytime temps were never not 90˚+ out. We were inside, AC on the whole time.
And I recalled the folks moving down to Florida, only one month after I moved down to Atlanta. They passed through my new home on Labor Day weekend 1993, heading south from our ancestral north. I drove down for Christmas that year. I remember it being glorious: warm tropical breezes, low on the humidity, high 70s every day. It was the reason those having endured a lifetime of contending with northern winters saw it as the next logical step: to find a place that is not a challenge each and every winter day. That the folks would settle on being year-round residents of southwest Florida, that I never did understand. But in the winter, I understood completely. . . .
Dad got up and was off to work at 6:30 every morning for almost 40 years. In winter, the horizon in northeast Connecticut doesn’t even crack grey until 7 a.m. Dad, more than anyone I knew, had earned winter highs in the 70s / low 80s. . . . But that was the mid 1990s. We were into the 2020s. It was uncomfortably hot every time within the past decade that I had ventured to this impermanent permanent structure beyond the Caloosahatchee. . . . It was early November, a time when we would be holding tight the first chill mornings in Atlanta. In North Fort Myers early November had not yet seen temps dip beneath the mid-high 80s. The open garage door did allow for the occasional merciful breeze. It provided nothing in my attempts to gather together piles of refuse, if granting some momentary relief. But then, this whole bitching about anything seemed to undermine the task at hand. “Don’t make it any harder than it needs to be,” something else Dad used to say; of course, having dropped such platitudes before going right on to bitch about all manner of things. In the genes, I supposed, and went right along bitching about the heat.
I was to the back wall and, again, the mostly empty workbench. The pegboard backing stood dutifully, still, stained by the relentless humid air that can seem at points ready to combust in ground-level rainbombs. J-hooks were fit snugly, orderly, fastened with plastic peg locks (of course) and still ready to serve. And that is when I came to the pencil sharpener. . . .
Dad was not at all against new tech. He had a Canon AE-1 when it was the latest greatest SLR and was early to the show buying a Kodak Slide Carousel to project all those slides (mostly of family vacations). He bought a VCR when VHS was still elbowing its way onto the scene and had my growing-up house strung with cable just as soon as it appeared in the neighborhood. But if there was one stand he was going to take on behalf of an analog world dissolving before the tidal-wave of digital everything, the humble pencil and simple pitch-perfect mechanics of the pencil sharpener was going to be it. I don’t know that he even liked writing with pens. We had sent men to the moon with pencils and slide-rules was something I had always heard growing up (if never truly believing, thinking it probably a tad more complicated). And though I do not recall Dad ever saying that, he might have. But more over, he certainly believed the mighty pencil had that in it. And the sharpener wasn’t even electric. Hand crank, baby. I am not sure there was a more tried-true vintage piece of tech in the whole garage, standing at attention on a wall stud about shoulder high, confident of its place in the world still, and ready to serve. It was glorious.
I was now beyond the workbench, down the mostly empty back wall and having passed the (so very 1970s) pea-green Craftsman shop-vac, still on the clock, that I grew up with and might very well have witnessed being purchased (regular trips to Sears from those years big events tabbed and well-ordered within the stacks of my memory). And it was about that point, beneath the gathering steam of afternoon, that I began to feel a completeness with the task; not just that I was doing a solid job (getting around and behind the freezer fixed into back-right-corner tricky, but accomplished), but that I was tying up a loose end.
Acceptance is how we continue on and don’t lose our heads amidst so much regular loss. But Rand McNally (again, so very 1970s) is rarely there to show you the way. You are left to plot your own course, in your own way, through loss to acceptance and, ultimately, the remnants of memory that fills in the gaps. . . . Now I have to state all of this was not necessarily crystallizing in a luminous revelatory way as I sweated it out, brushing down, sweeping and cleaning up that final right-hand wall thoroughly (taking down two bulky awkward sets of long removed French doors from a wall-length shelf unit to get in behind them). But a realization did begin to sprout in that moment, in the midst of that final act: that even the trace outlines of a person can still be so robust in a location that they inhabited daily, though they have been gone for so long. And not in an incorporeal otherworldly way—but in a very real way. The stuff is key, but it is more than just stuff. It is how a place and all within it was arranged, designed in this case to satisfy a specific sense of order.
My Dad was nothing without his very specific sense of order. Even the sense of order itself seemed to take orders from somewhere further up the chain. He preferred a military-like structure, the crisp precision of knowing exactly one’s role within a world created from, and still churned of, chaos. Such blind respect for top-down order was most definitely a thing that did not spiral its way down the gene-strings into my own. But the general comforting feel of an orderly existence, now that is something I have come to more and more as the years tick by—if not becoming mildly obsessed with it in my own way (this, though, I rarely bother to “touch up” anything, settling just fine on a more worn look to my dwelling).
That order, the comfortable arrangement of “the familiar,” that was the “feel” of this place still, of what would always be (and Mom would agree) “Dad’s garage.” That was what I was gathering in on that early November day. Once a human imprints themself on a space, that such trace remaining outlines of a life still light up like neon to those in the know. This was a deep-volume insight, as if I held a rare unique skill. I was a curator in that moment of time, that act of labor, carefully dusting and brushing and cleaning up the remnants of a physical space so very familiar to me not for the actual space, but the person that had arranged it just so. So little of Dad remained within the space itself, and yet Dad was all around. That this place I had rarely thought twice about in the near thirty years it had been a part of my family’s life would, within a few hours, bump its way up the list of important places in my life . . . well, that was something.
Soon, this garage would no longer be in my life, the place and its sudden elevation in my head, its feel of “home,” to be retired to memory in and among the warehouse of items I had long been curating as essential, defining, core to my being. Cleaning it up and doing it right this one last time became more than just another task on a list. It was performing a duty, honoring a life lived. It was my final act of acceptance after which I could close that book for good.
When just the faint traces of a person remain, perhaps that is when their presence is felt most directly. How our brief presence on this orb can outlast us in more than just memory. How each trace item related to us, curated in life by us, and stumbled upon by others after we are gone can be like an electric jolt to memory; this then bringing forth the flood of recollection to those doing the remembering, if imperfect in form. Your memories will not save you from the nostalgic hues of self-editing. But then stuff and space itself will set the record straight, having recorded a more accurate version of history than our forgetting minds possibly could.
And that connection to a place has been a thing I have spent long hours with. Is it even a thing without people, more over people important to the arc of your life? Yes, of course. We all feel like we are “from” somewhere; and it is a great gift to know and feel that you really are from a place, that you belong. The folks truly believed that they were from this place they had retired to. But theirs’ was a transitory concept. They were no longer from the northeast where they had been born, where their families had been for generations, where they grew up and became adults and fell in love, got married, had and raised us kids. They were from there once and were from there still, historically. But during their time in southwest Florida, that was where they were from. That was home.
And I will admit, having lived all of my adult life in and around the Atlanta area, there is still something about it that does not feel to me like “my home.” And yet, it is my place. It is the place where I belong, where I live my life; and it is so because the spaces and places are so very much my wife’s and my own: our spaces carefully calibrated, ordered just so. And so, though I am from a very different place than the south, and still often identify more with that place than the south, Atlanta is home.
Home is no monolithic thing, a sense of place fixed for all time. It can be many things, a compound element at the core of your sense of self. And I can now see that it was my folks who schooled me on this, that place and home can be a transitory thing—that it is negotiable. Anyone can be from somewhere, from a place. But it is the imprint we leave on a place that makes it “ours.” In the end, it is people that solidify the places we call home.
* * *
Five months after I completed that most profound of practical tasks, the time had come for the mentioned big move. It was nothing my Mom had wanted, but it was, if sadly, the thing to be done. Mom, now in her 80s, 15 years a widow, needed to be closer to one of us kids and had decided to head back to where a good deal of my family remained in my growing-up home land of northeast Connecticut. I awoke early that April morning, earlier than anyone else. The dawn of day had always been my favorite thing about that place in southwest Florida, prior to the heat and its devilish inflation of the effects of a humidity that was almost always present, even early. That morning was it: an end point, full stop. The house and garage, that plot of land, would soon be someone else’s to tend and call home. It already felt as if it were a piece of the past. And the whole of that notion had me in a reflective mood.
As dawn slowly scoped the thick fog, a mourning dove could be heard just out front near the garage. I was instantly transported back to the first time I recall connecting that smooth swooning sound to the call of a mourning dove, was maybe ten at the time. It was in a place a world away from Florida, but one that has always held an outsize space in my head. I was transported lakeside to the pristine Kezar Lake in Lovell, Maine, just this side of the White Mountain National Forest, where I spent a few weeks each summer at a cabin owned by a work colleague of Dad’s. A regular family vacation spot for the better part of the 1970s-80s, it was a place Dad & I often inhabited as a team, just the two of us, for many of my pre-teen to early-teen years. That the mourning dove’s call found range over that entire highly divergent territory between western Maine and Gulf Coast Florida was fascinating enough; but that it tied together transitory places so personally weighted and divergent in nature as all the ecosystem that exists between those two poles . . . well, in that reflective moment that hit me in a profound way.
The trace outlines of Dad: on the dock in front of that cabin, at the workbench in that garage, in our yard growing up, in my own house back in Atlanta—all of that coalesced into a most complete rendering. At no other point since he had left this mortal plane had he seemed so very close. I could not have scripted a scene from scratch any better. That moment held all of what I had come to realize in cleaning up that most functional of spaces the previous November: that place and home are just concepts, just outlines. It is the people who inhabit and give those spaces shape that amplify it to something like holy.
* * *
I started at the inside front-left corner and would wind counter-clockwise around to the front-right corner. A stand-alone structure, the garage stood just a few paces in front of, and to one side of my folks’ retirement house, itself mobile home in material if fixed in place, not going anywhere. There was no sparing of amenities. It was spacious and comfortable inside. It could seem a very impermanent structure from outside but for its going on thirty-year tenure: one in a community of dozens of cul-de-sacs of the same, the community itself one of dozens of the same along a busy strip of Route 41 in southwest Florida. The house and garage had been re-roofed in advance of putting it on the market, this having left the garage a mess. That, plus, Dad had been absent his tending duties since 2007, most outdoor work, the garage—his space, his zen—nothing my Mom had cared too much for past or present.
I was making progress down the left-hand wall when I snapped to long enough to realize I had not been cleaning overhead first, having started with an automatic sweeping of the floor. Shingle bits, years of wind-blown leaves and dried grass, your average neglect, forced me to slide back to left-front corner, long broom in hand. I started over with the high up wall niches and shelving littered of the mentioned debris, cobwebs, etc. Be thorough in what you did. Dad taught me that. Dad was in just about everything I did. That was not always a good thing. Dad was too reliant on “the system,” a bit too “company line” for my wandering daydreaming ways. But many things in life just need to be done; and for that, Dad’s guidance was training without equal. It was certainly the most important thing right then and the most obvious; for it was immediately apparent: Dad was all around me.
Nearly fifteen years had come and gone since he had been suddenly removed from my expected day-to-day outline, the day-to-day routine of this place in North Fort Myers, Florida. Along the left-hand wall and just beyond the recycling bins was a trove of old-school tools, some of which I recognized from their place along the inside left-hand wall (for real) of the attached garage of my growing-up house in Connecticut—where Dad truly tended the land. Here they were in my present, again. Dad, long past, present again.
Some of the tools by look alone had to have been handed down by my grandfather, my Dad’s dad also a prodigious outdoor worker (and woodworker and top-shelf gardener, for that matter). It was in the genes, the outdoor work-in-the-yard thing. Grandpa and Dad both kept pristine yards, a model for routine upkeep of house and property. I had, and still do aim for the same, if tempered by my supplemental Gen X training that could not help but sniff out suburban banality and time blown on the formal upkeep of appearances with a sneer; of course, that before so many of my generation—myself front and center—resolved upon our own version of the same, the sneer having eased in realizing the settling power of place and home.
And the tools: solid wood shafts, all metal, no lack of craftsmanship in their construction, though certainly mass-produced. A metal rake that was still as functional as the one I had back at my house, but with 30-40+ years of age over my “new” (c. late 1990s) metal rake. Another smaller metal rake, more a long-handled garden rake with only four teeth. An array of modern-bought tools framed the most unique: an edger, a half circle of solid sharpened steel, with heel-lip for pressing down with force in making the precise cuts it was designed for. A so simple, but effective tool that I would never have need for. (Again, I only aim for that pristine ideal.) Still, I would eventually take it and the two metal rakes with me when the big move came the following Spring. They all seemed historic, personally important. How so much of our material stuff will outlive us, and by decades, longer than human lifetimes. Stored correctly—as in along the inside left-hand wall of a well-tended garage—these tools would easily outlive me, as they did Dad and Grandpa. I could only hope their future had them hanging in the garage or shed of one of my nephews, if only to keep the string alive. Three implements, unconcerned with time or the concept of a fleeting mortality, if embodying those mortals who bought and used them. A simple purpose so specific. That so much of our material stuff lives on beyond us, and yet does so as the lingering outline of us. Two metal rakes and an edger: functional, reliable. I do not think I could have scripted a profile from scratch that better captured Dad’s time on this Earth: a tender of things, a maintainer of things, precise and dutiful in the role.
Within a few months of Dad having died, my brother had taken it on himself to visit with the express intent of clearing out the garage. This would have been too much for Mom, and not necessarily for its emotional impact, but for the sheer scope of the task. Dad’s workbenches had always been, let’s say: comprehensive. Even in retirement, this was a point of emphasis: to be prepared for anything. And with my brother performing this much lauded clearing out, most of Dad’s overtly detailed, dutifully labeled, often redundant if abundantly prepared command-and-control center along the back wall had been left mostly bare. Gone were the half-dozen different sizes of finishing nail each in their specific slide-in cubby, varying gauge of bolt by which to attach anything to anything else than had been constructed over the previous half-century, and wire nuts enough to repair all household lamps from the Keys to Sarasota. All of the paint cans and the ubiquitous stains (“touching up” Dad’s life-long obsession), the back-up collections of twist / zip-ties, all of it had been cleared out. Of all the things mentioned, only the occasional label or note was left scattered throughout the inside of the garage.
It was in and around those hanging tools, those dutiful sentries, that I spotted the first of the few that remained. But rather than breezing a mind wandering nostalgically, this one stopped me cold. I will not claim it under oath, but I think I felt sharp physical pain in the act of noticing. Above the sprinkling system console was a series of dates written on a post-it note. Dutifully, of course, Dad had documented each watering across the tail end of 2006 into early 2007, the note stilled at that point in time. Just from the notation I could tell that late 2006 had witnessed plenty of rainfall, only a few dates listed starting in October. (Though I must note that 10/22 and 11/11 were both watering days and coincide with, respectively, my wife’s birthday and our anniversary. Kind of have to believe both were on purpose.) But then, the weather clearly shifts in January of 2007, as weekly waterings were required: 1/8, 1/14, 1/22, 1/31. Dutiful, reliable, he would not suffer the indignity of browning grass in Florida in the winter. . . .
And then Dad died: February 16, 2007, a massive aneurysm that erased an entire life’s archive of dutiful reliable service in an instant (that it fell two days after my birthday just spiking the sharp physical pain the news induced). But I was mostly struck by the two final dates on that post-it: 2/27 and 3/6. I can only think Dad had been plotting a future that was not to be. And I thought as I stood there, broom-in-hand, how even scratch-out notes outlive us and outline who we were, when we were, as much if not more than any visual record possibly could. A photograph only frames a visage, a glancing take on the person that was. A post-it containing maintenance tasks dating beyond that person’s mortal time-stamp? Kind of says it all, certainly about my Dad, at least. This one toss-away note, it seemed as perfect a memorial as one could have possibly conceived. And that rattled through my head, the all of it, as I continued on.
Just beyond the hanging yard tools was a stack of unused landscaping bricks. I started to sweep around them, heavy foot-by-foot tiles, before putting down the broom and moving them all out first. Yes, yes, be thorough; and as anticipated there was a mess behind, the stack having created a hidden hollow for shingle bits and old roofing nails to accumulate during the recent re-roofing. But despite the discovery of hidden caches of random years-long messes, I was making progress. Getting around, behind, and above the hot water heater in the back-left corner, I had worked my way down to the back wall and near empty workbench by about noon.
Above the trash cans, situated in their long-time place of honor alongside the hot water heater, I noticed what I had not before. Having regularly taken out the trash for Mom on visits over the past 15 years, I had never before spotted a rectangular newspaper clipping noting the county’s recycling rules: “What can go in the blue bin . . . and what can’t.” A faint trace of Dad. Being who he was—precise, prepared (often overdoing both)—of course it was dated: 7/06; which meant that as of July 2006, Dad was prepared to not run afoul the edicts of the county waste management authorities. “If you are going to do something, do it right.” I could hear the faint echo of something to that effect reverberating, still, within that most functional space, or inside my head—or both—memory and physical space fusing in narrative.
The clipped strip of newspaper was only 15 years old, though it looked of some scratched out parchment from colonial times, withering rapidly to a sere sepia tone amidst the year-round sauna that is any garage in southwest Florida. And in that instant it jumped out as symbolic of a bygone era, of Dad’s having lived and worked in this space; just that it really did seem from a lifetime ago. Since that more stark end point in February 2007, his being alive had receded by orders of magnitude in my head, far greater than the simple passing of years. His being alive could seem of a whole other epoch, as if decades had passed; though, obviously, that was not the case. And perhaps this was all just part of my processing that rip in time. We, the living, in order to keep going have to distance ourselves from the pain points of the past. . . . But then, a physical trace: a post-it note, a newspaper clipping, all that it takes for memories to again take flesh-and-blood form; a life lived, and you being the beneficiary. To clean this garage well one last time was the very least I could do. But I also knew, Dad would have held so small a thing a great honor.
I mopped away sweat. It was the first week of November 2021. But it was still hot, very hot. . . . Now I have lived my entire adult life in and about Atlanta, Georgia. I know what heat and humidity can be. But here was deep southwest Florida in a world enduring rapid planetary warm-up. The first few weeks of November would have autumn hovering cool cyan domes over the urban forests of my east side Atlanta home. I had left behind prime firepit weather to come south and help Mom with the move, and was missing it hard right then, a long sought after time of year in Atlanta. I cannot see that prime firepit weather ever visited this far south anymore. The last family Christmas gathering that we had in Florida was 2018. Daytime temps were never not 90˚+ out. We were inside, AC on the whole time.
And I recalled the folks moving down to Florida, only one month after I moved down to Atlanta. They passed through my new home on Labor Day weekend 1993, heading south from our ancestral north. I drove down for Christmas that year. I remember it being glorious: warm tropical breezes, low on the humidity, high 70s every day. It was the reason those having endured a lifetime of contending with northern winters saw it as the next logical step: to find a place that is not a challenge each and every winter day. That the folks would settle on being year-round residents of southwest Florida, that I never did understand. But in the winter, I understood completely. . . .
Dad got up and was off to work at 6:30 every morning for almost 40 years. In winter, the horizon in northeast Connecticut doesn’t even crack grey until 7 a.m. Dad, more than anyone I knew, had earned winter highs in the 70s / low 80s. . . . But that was the mid 1990s. We were into the 2020s. It was uncomfortably hot every time within the past decade that I had ventured to this impermanent permanent structure beyond the Caloosahatchee. . . . It was early November, a time when we would be holding tight the first chill mornings in Atlanta. In North Fort Myers early November had not yet seen temps dip beneath the mid-high 80s. The open garage door did allow for the occasional merciful breeze. It provided nothing in my attempts to gather together piles of refuse, if granting some momentary relief. But then, this whole bitching about anything seemed to undermine the task at hand. “Don’t make it any harder than it needs to be,” something else Dad used to say; of course, having dropped such platitudes before going right on to bitch about all manner of things. In the genes, I supposed, and went right along bitching about the heat.
I was to the back wall and, again, the mostly empty workbench. The pegboard backing stood dutifully, still, stained by the relentless humid air that can seem at points ready to combust in ground-level rainbombs. J-hooks were fit snugly, orderly, fastened with plastic peg locks (of course) and still ready to serve. And that is when I came to the pencil sharpener. . . .
Dad was not at all against new tech. He had a Canon AE-1 when it was the latest greatest SLR and was early to the show buying a Kodak Slide Carousel to project all those slides (mostly of family vacations). He bought a VCR when VHS was still elbowing its way onto the scene and had my growing-up house strung with cable just as soon as it appeared in the neighborhood. But if there was one stand he was going to take on behalf of an analog world dissolving before the tidal-wave of digital everything, the humble pencil and simple pitch-perfect mechanics of the pencil sharpener was going to be it. I don’t know that he even liked writing with pens. We had sent men to the moon with pencils and slide-rules was something I had always heard growing up (if never truly believing, thinking it probably a tad more complicated). And though I do not recall Dad ever saying that, he might have. But more over, he certainly believed the mighty pencil had that in it. And the sharpener wasn’t even electric. Hand crank, baby. I am not sure there was a more tried-true vintage piece of tech in the whole garage, standing at attention on a wall stud about shoulder high, confident of its place in the world still, and ready to serve. It was glorious.
I was now beyond the workbench, down the mostly empty back wall and having passed the (so very 1970s) pea-green Craftsman shop-vac, still on the clock, that I grew up with and might very well have witnessed being purchased (regular trips to Sears from those years big events tabbed and well-ordered within the stacks of my memory). And it was about that point, beneath the gathering steam of afternoon, that I began to feel a completeness with the task; not just that I was doing a solid job (getting around and behind the freezer fixed into back-right-corner tricky, but accomplished), but that I was tying up a loose end.
Acceptance is how we continue on and don’t lose our heads amidst so much regular loss. But Rand McNally (again, so very 1970s) is rarely there to show you the way. You are left to plot your own course, in your own way, through loss to acceptance and, ultimately, the remnants of memory that fills in the gaps. . . . Now I have to state all of this was not necessarily crystallizing in a luminous revelatory way as I sweated it out, brushing down, sweeping and cleaning up that final right-hand wall thoroughly (taking down two bulky awkward sets of long removed French doors from a wall-length shelf unit to get in behind them). But a realization did begin to sprout in that moment, in the midst of that final act: that even the trace outlines of a person can still be so robust in a location that they inhabited daily, though they have been gone for so long. And not in an incorporeal otherworldly way—but in a very real way. The stuff is key, but it is more than just stuff. It is how a place and all within it was arranged, designed in this case to satisfy a specific sense of order.
My Dad was nothing without his very specific sense of order. Even the sense of order itself seemed to take orders from somewhere further up the chain. He preferred a military-like structure, the crisp precision of knowing exactly one’s role within a world created from, and still churned of, chaos. Such blind respect for top-down order was most definitely a thing that did not spiral its way down the gene-strings into my own. But the general comforting feel of an orderly existence, now that is something I have come to more and more as the years tick by—if not becoming mildly obsessed with it in my own way (this, though, I rarely bother to “touch up” anything, settling just fine on a more worn look to my dwelling).
That order, the comfortable arrangement of “the familiar,” that was the “feel” of this place still, of what would always be (and Mom would agree) “Dad’s garage.” That was what I was gathering in on that early November day. Once a human imprints themself on a space, that such trace remaining outlines of a life still light up like neon to those in the know. This was a deep-volume insight, as if I held a rare unique skill. I was a curator in that moment of time, that act of labor, carefully dusting and brushing and cleaning up the remnants of a physical space so very familiar to me not for the actual space, but the person that had arranged it just so. So little of Dad remained within the space itself, and yet Dad was all around. That this place I had rarely thought twice about in the near thirty years it had been a part of my family’s life would, within a few hours, bump its way up the list of important places in my life . . . well, that was something.
Soon, this garage would no longer be in my life, the place and its sudden elevation in my head, its feel of “home,” to be retired to memory in and among the warehouse of items I had long been curating as essential, defining, core to my being. Cleaning it up and doing it right this one last time became more than just another task on a list. It was performing a duty, honoring a life lived. It was my final act of acceptance after which I could close that book for good.
When just the faint traces of a person remain, perhaps that is when their presence is felt most directly. How our brief presence on this orb can outlast us in more than just memory. How each trace item related to us, curated in life by us, and stumbled upon by others after we are gone can be like an electric jolt to memory; this then bringing forth the flood of recollection to those doing the remembering, if imperfect in form. Your memories will not save you from the nostalgic hues of self-editing. But then stuff and space itself will set the record straight, having recorded a more accurate version of history than our forgetting minds possibly could.
And that connection to a place has been a thing I have spent long hours with. Is it even a thing without people, more over people important to the arc of your life? Yes, of course. We all feel like we are “from” somewhere; and it is a great gift to know and feel that you really are from a place, that you belong. The folks truly believed that they were from this place they had retired to. But theirs’ was a transitory concept. They were no longer from the northeast where they had been born, where their families had been for generations, where they grew up and became adults and fell in love, got married, had and raised us kids. They were from there once and were from there still, historically. But during their time in southwest Florida, that was where they were from. That was home.
And I will admit, having lived all of my adult life in and around the Atlanta area, there is still something about it that does not feel to me like “my home.” And yet, it is my place. It is the place where I belong, where I live my life; and it is so because the spaces and places are so very much my wife’s and my own: our spaces carefully calibrated, ordered just so. And so, though I am from a very different place than the south, and still often identify more with that place than the south, Atlanta is home.
Home is no monolithic thing, a sense of place fixed for all time. It can be many things, a compound element at the core of your sense of self. And I can now see that it was my folks who schooled me on this, that place and home can be a transitory thing—that it is negotiable. Anyone can be from somewhere, from a place. But it is the imprint we leave on a place that makes it “ours.” In the end, it is people that solidify the places we call home.
* * *
Five months after I completed that most profound of practical tasks, the time had come for the mentioned big move. It was nothing my Mom had wanted, but it was, if sadly, the thing to be done. Mom, now in her 80s, 15 years a widow, needed to be closer to one of us kids and had decided to head back to where a good deal of my family remained in my growing-up home land of northeast Connecticut. I awoke early that April morning, earlier than anyone else. The dawn of day had always been my favorite thing about that place in southwest Florida, prior to the heat and its devilish inflation of the effects of a humidity that was almost always present, even early. That morning was it: an end point, full stop. The house and garage, that plot of land, would soon be someone else’s to tend and call home. It already felt as if it were a piece of the past. And the whole of that notion had me in a reflective mood.
As dawn slowly scoped the thick fog, a mourning dove could be heard just out front near the garage. I was instantly transported back to the first time I recall connecting that smooth swooning sound to the call of a mourning dove, was maybe ten at the time. It was in a place a world away from Florida, but one that has always held an outsize space in my head. I was transported lakeside to the pristine Kezar Lake in Lovell, Maine, just this side of the White Mountain National Forest, where I spent a few weeks each summer at a cabin owned by a work colleague of Dad’s. A regular family vacation spot for the better part of the 1970s-80s, it was a place Dad & I often inhabited as a team, just the two of us, for many of my pre-teen to early-teen years. That the mourning dove’s call found range over that entire highly divergent territory between western Maine and Gulf Coast Florida was fascinating enough; but that it tied together transitory places so personally weighted and divergent in nature as all the ecosystem that exists between those two poles . . . well, in that reflective moment that hit me in a profound way.
The trace outlines of Dad: on the dock in front of that cabin, at the workbench in that garage, in our yard growing up, in my own house back in Atlanta—all of that coalesced into a most complete rendering. At no other point since he had left this mortal plane had he seemed so very close. I could not have scripted a scene from scratch any better. That moment held all of what I had come to realize in cleaning up that most functional of spaces the previous November: that place and home are just concepts, just outlines. It is the people who inhabit and give those spaces shape that amplify it to something like holy.
