Ross, Adrienne, My Father's Photograph

My Father's Photograph

My father's photograph revealed a man I never met, forever young. My father was forever old. The man in the photograph has arms folded steady under a plaid flannel shirt, but my father's arms were bone and folds of freckled skin hanging beneath undershirts sweat soaked mornings, mid-day, afternoons, twilight, nights of the tremors, shakes, quakes of Parkinson's Disease. The man in the photograph ambled up the grassy hillock, turned, balanced on the slight slope, and stood with my mother as if he had all the time in the world, his life.

The trees behind him were not yet in bloom.

My father journeyed from the kitchen table to the counter, gripping chair to chair as he forced one leg to move, then the other. He grabbed the counter¹s edge hand over shaking hand until he reached the shreds of white notepaper left beside the stove. There he pondered the faint pencil marks slashed across 7:30, 1:30, 7:30,11:30, the times of his last L-Dopa or Sinemet pill.

The man in the photograph is lost to the laughter and memories of dead brothers and sisters who loved him. My father remained after cancer, after losing his spleen, after small strokes left him stunned on the bathroom floor, after a final stroke exploded half his brain, after Parkinson's stiffened muscles to stone, after pneumonia, after pneumonia again, after a promised quick death when life support was reduced to an IV drip of sugar water, but he stayed alive another week, at least. My mother destroyed that photograph. She buried my father's ashes under an orange tree. The grass there is thick, sharp, neatly clipped.

each spring white blossoms scatter ghosts on the wind.

Adrienne Ross's essays have appeared in Tikkun, Northern Lights, New Age Journal, Earth Light, An Intricate Weave: Women Write on Girls and Girlhood, the American Nature Writing Anthology Series (1996, 1997 and 2000 volumes), The Literature of Spirituality - Many Mountains Moving, and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry appearances include Bridges, Poets On and American Writing. She has received awards from the Seattle Arts Commission and the Washington State Artist Trust Foundation.