ECF and What Comes After the Storm

I took this picture last night as I walked to the Metro. The weather was quite bad here yesterday and the calm after the storm yielded a gorgeous pink sky. Very appropriate to this post.

Nearly 3 months ago, my father returned home from a weekend away to find that his house had been flooded to a degree that required most of it to be gutted. We were happy to be able to offer him a place to live so he moved into the rec room of our small house.

The time since then has been interesting and I think that we have all learned a lot. My girls can now detect the opening of a tube of Ben Gay from across the house. We also know that sending my dad to the Costco can yield interesting results such as a refrigerator packed with 6 half gallon containers of orange juice. (He thought it might be too much but bought it anyway.) We learned that my dad’s taste buds may be a little out of wack. How else can you explain the fact that he didn’t notice that he was using GINGER rather than GARLIC on his pizza until midway through the second slice? Hmmm…

I listened in amusement as my dad matched wits and wills with Stinkerbelle on a regular basis. Let’s call that one a draw.

I never expected deep conversation but my very conservative dad and I had a lot of very interesting conversations about the direction of the country and other, equally controversial issues. There was no yelling or bloodshed.

The biggest surprises were the conversations that my dad and I had about my knitting. The Shirley of the title was my dad’s mother. It is from her that I inherited my knitting needles and I taught myself to knit as a tribute to her. I never knew if any of this meant anything to him. It does. My unsentimental dad told me that he likes the name of the blog (so it will stay) and commented on the differences between my reasons for knitting and those of my grandmother and great-grandmother. It pleases him that I knit. It pleases me that it matters to him.

I mention this now because my dad moved out yesterday. I’m happy to have the house back to normal but I’m also pleased that we were able to spend some quality time together. Of course normal is a relative term and here it means that the chaos is diminished just a little – not completely eradicated. My brother and his wife will arrive on Tuesday for a Thanksgiving visit and, shortly after they leave, we’ll host a bunch of giggling tweens overnight in celebration of the Drama Queen’s birthday. See – the fun never ends!