Sometimes it seems there are more things that need doing than there is time to do them. I’m finding myself in that position as I try to purge my house of clutter and projects I will never in ten lifetimes get to. I need to lighten my load so that I can move forward with getting housemates to make this place pay for itself.

When I set my studio up a year ago, everything was in its proper place, all neat and tidy and ready at any moment when the creative urge struck me. When Mr. Virgo died, a lot of stuff got thrown into the studio to make room for the company who came to stay with me those first few days. Then I spent the majority of the next few months away traveling in TOW-Wanda. I told myself I would settle down after the first of the year and really get things cleaned out. Now, here it is, the end of January and I’m sitting in my studio, praying for direction. I called a friend and discussed a strategy and we conversed over the speaker phone for an hour while I got started. Once you get moving, it’s easier to keep moving. Thank God for good friends!

As I sorted and threw things away, I came across an ancient stationery box filled with little mementoes of my father’s and I sat down to go through it. He and I did not have a good relationship. He was a psychologically abusive alcoholic when I was growing up. He and my mother finally divorced when I was 21, and he moved back to the town he was raised in. He stopped drinking and became a Christian and everyone who knew him in his new life thought he was wonderful. They told me at his funeral what a gentle and caring man he was. How he volunteered and was an upstanding member of the church he and his second wife attended. This only served to make me more angry with him. I had tried all of my life to have a relationship with him and even though he had allegedly “changed”, his modus operandi with me was the same as it had always been…blame and shame. It only served to make me feel worse about myself and I finally had to stop beating my head against the wall. I had to let it go. I had to realize he was never going to be the dad that I had wanted, that I had deserved.

So, now I sit here at my desk with the only items I inherited from my father. An ancient stationery box, tied closed with a tattered brown shoestring. Inside is a cracked leather wallet containing nothing but a swim certification card and an ID card from 1942. There is a medal from World War II and some patches from his Army Air Corps uniform. A handful of shells from New Guinea. A tiny memory book from his Junior-Senior Banquet, corners crumbling, faded names of long dead friends written in pencil. A program for the Mackay Trotting Club Races with the bets in pounds instead of dollars. His high school diploma. A letter from the one woman he ever truly loved…not my mother…the woman who broke his heart and led him to settle for the next best thing in his eyes which, unfortunately, WAS my mother. His birth certificate and Notice of Certification for the military. A picture from the newspaper when he won a fiberglass fishing rod and reel the year I was born. The birth announcement from my second child. A postcard with a picture of the nursing home in which he eventually died after Alzheimer’s ravaged his mind.

Along with some snapshots, and an old sweatshirt his wife gave me, this is all I have of my father. This and the memories. The Christmas Eves when mom piled us in the car to hunt him down at some bar and bring him home. The time he knocked me off the piano bench then sat on the bottom step and cried. The time he brought a loaded gun to the kitchen when I was ten and begged my mother to kill him. But, if I sit really quietly, I can remember when he bounced us on his knee during the opening music of Bonanza, sending us reeling on imaginary galloping steeds. The time he took me fishing. The time he chased the neighbor boy off for peeking in the window at me, ready to defend my honor if need be. The time he taught me to change a tire and get out of a snowbank before he would let me get my driver’s license. The time he talked me through the steps of building my first birdhouse. I still have that birdhouse on my front porch.

Yes, there are hurts in our lives that we can never forget. But the ticket to freedom from the past lies in forgiveness. In letting go. In releasing him from the awesome, unfulfillable responsibility of my happiness. Thus letting that little girl, who still lives inside me, hold out her hands and release her death grip on the dove she has held to her breast for far too long…releasing it to fly ever upward. And in so doing, has bought her own freedom.