Even if I wasn’t his Favorite, He Loved Me All the Same

We'd spend time together, me coming up to sweep the sawdust from his feet. The closest thing I had to a father figure. This old man, this 83-year-old man would be fixated on the self-built wooden table before him, sawing something, tossing the safety off like it was an option. I know it. I reminded him so often.

And then, after I swept the sawdust from the floor and he picked his feet up so as to let me do the job I had designated myself. I asked him. "Pop, what might you be doing up there anyway?"

"Well, come 'ere and listen and I'll show you."

And my plump little face with my ugly thick girls tied behind my head in that suffocatingly tight ponytail would come up beside his right, then yank to his left so I might not obstruct his arm.

"You see this?"

I stared at it, my eyes turning up to him and nodding.

"You know what this is?"

"No sir."

"This is a carpenter's square."

"A carpenter's square?"

And he nodded to me, pulling a piece of wood up to himself, the smell of sawdust hitting my nose, making it wrinkle as my brown eyes stared down at the wood he was scratching with his knife-sharpened pencil. "You find the spot you want to measure," he grumbled, my ears listening hard to his low voice, so much that I only made out a few slivers of his words. "And then you make you cut. You measure twice."

"Twice?"

"Twice."

And I sat out there with him in the heat, in the house built on the sloped hill that could have caved in at any point and taken us all with it, the sandy slope, and the smell of sawdust rubbing off his thinning skin onto my fresh skin.

And we would stand there together, me watching him silently, as he spoke and talked and showed me how he learned to be a carpenter.

Rest in Peace, Pop. I loved you in life as I loved you in death. <3