Quill & Parchment:A Ten Times Painted House

A Ten-Times Painted House
by Glenn Schiffman

The night lay hot and threatening over the town when my father died. It was a town where Old Quakers and bloody
butchers, white frame churches and slaughterhouses abided side by side. It was a town where an old growth forest
was cut down to make room for factories that tanned hides and made glue. It was a town where boys drowned because
their fathers never learned to swim. It was a town where young girls wore high-top shoes with long laces and grew
into women who rarely laughed.

The house in which he died was two hundred years old and its clapboards had just been painted white for the tenth
time. It had a wide green-painted porch around three sides. Barely two hundred yards away freight trains, their
whistles shrieking, rolled past every hour on the hour.

   One memorable night past midnight in the summer of my tenth year my father woke me.

  "Wake up," he said."There’s a big storm coming. Let’s go watch."

We went downstairs and out the front door to stand on the covered porch in our pajamas and heed the thunder, gasp
at lightning, and glory the pouring rain. We witnessed that storm release from a burdened sky. We minded it like
two Airedales drinking from a tasty stream. We surveyed it like poachers at the edge of a Lord’s estate. We
watched that collision of nature with joy in our hearts until Mother appeared at the door and ordered me back to
bed before "I caught my death."

    My father bought a two-seat swing for that Victorian porch. He bought four-hundred-pound test chain and three-quarter
inch eye hooks from which to hang it. He never put the swing up.

    Once my father said he wished he could throw it "all in,"but my mother just looked at him. She would have laughed
had she learned how.

    "Throw what all in?" I asked.

    "You know, like a storm," he said. "Give it my all. Live life to the fullest."

"First put up the swing," Mother said."So I have a place to sit and watch you live life to the fullest. Better yet,"
she mused, "let’s move from here, far away from here, so I don’t have to listen to that infernal train whistle ever
again."

    My father was born and raised in that ten-times painted house. At the sign of a spring frost he covered our three
cherry trees with gauze to protect the blossoms. When the cherries were ripe he competed with the songbirds for
the most delicious ones.

    He is unburdened, now, and I am glad for him. His soul sleeps in the room where it was born. His ashes grace the
lawn under the cherry trees.

    The night of the day we spread his ashes there was a thunderstorm, of course. Mother and I stood on the porch and
wept for our futures. Her tears were drawn with sorrow and loss; mine sang with joy and relief.

    My father wished he could throw it all in, but not if it meant leaving the house of his forefathers. I could. I
left the ten-times painted house on a hot night with distant thunder south and west, threatening, just like the night
he died.

    Before I left I put up the porch swing.

    Mother sits there now and listens for the next train.

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