Oh, it's an Axe...
50 years ago, give or take a year. my Dad bought a small axe for chopping wood for kindling - we had coal fire in those days. (No one knows what Jack Frost is on a bedroom windows these days). Me being me, decided that chopping wood and everything else was quite fun. My father sensibly decided to hide the axe from a manic 5 year old.
He hid it. He hid it from me, and, ultimately, hid it from himself.
I remember when I was a teenager my Mom mentioning something about "when Dad finds that axe".
The lost axe slowly merged into family legend. Did Dad hide it on the Allotment (a mile or two away)? Did my Uncle borrow it a not return it? Did we actually have an axe in the first place?
The shed at the top of the garden - itself over 40 years old (shed, not garden) - finally collapsed into a heap of rotten timber last winter and a couple of weeks ago Mom paid a couple of men to dismantle what was left and remove it.
Can you guess what they found?
Wrong.
They found nothing. But what they did do was to put anything possibly worth keeping in the remaining greenhouse that my Dad built about 35 years ago - and there in the greenhouse was the axe... The same greenhouse that Dad used every year until he died in 2002.
NFI? Me neither.
He hid it. He hid it from me, and, ultimately, hid it from himself.
I remember when I was a teenager my Mom mentioning something about "when Dad finds that axe".
The lost axe slowly merged into family legend. Did Dad hide it on the Allotment (a mile or two away)? Did my Uncle borrow it a not return it? Did we actually have an axe in the first place?
The shed at the top of the garden - itself over 40 years old (shed, not garden) - finally collapsed into a heap of rotten timber last winter and a couple of weeks ago Mom paid a couple of men to dismantle what was left and remove it.
Can you guess what they found?
Wrong.
They found nothing. But what they did do was to put anything possibly worth keeping in the remaining greenhouse that my Dad built about 35 years ago - and there in the greenhouse was the axe... The same greenhouse that Dad used every year until he died in 2002.
NFI? Me neither.
Comments