For my Father

The sky was full of grey’s and blues as the sun hid inside the clouds. Amidst the many decorations in the backyard, sat two people, one wizened and grayed, with the hint of a smile that crinkled out from the corners of his blue eyes. The other, a girl, sat cross legged in an armchair, similar blue eyes concentrated on the smoke that escaped the mans cigar and exhales. The smell reminded her of her childhood and she leaned back and smiled haphazardly.
“They told me it would never float,” He started, as he talked with his cigar in between his teeth. It bobbed up and down, as if waving to the girl in the chair. “And I told them they had no other choice but to make it float.” He stopped then and withdrew the cigar. Smiling, he continued. “All I wanted, was a two story lodge that floated in the water. Now really, was that so much to ask?” With a chuckle he shook his head. The girl felt a smile tug at the corner of her mouth. She knew the man to be tough and temperamental when he needed to be. It was a quality the confrontation fearing girl had always admired. She re-crossed her legs and looked up at the sky.
“I don’t know when the dream occurred to me, but once I knew what I wanted it was a power that I didn’t want to stop. To look back now and see how much I lost and gained during those years gives me an insight I don’t expect you to understand until you’re much older.
‘Once I started to envision this lodge, this sanctuary, where people could go to be close with their families and do something that was once in a lifetime, it’s all I wanted. I dreamt about it during conference calls with my clients, and marinated over it when I was knee deep in paperwork. Do you remember those days? Do you remember how long I stayed cramped up in that office?”
The girl only nodded, from the look on her face it appeared that the days of being cooped up in an office had long since past, and had done so when she had been too young to understand what sacrifice meant. She invited him to keep telling his story. He straightened his legs and slid down his chair a little, as the cigar in his hand lightly gave off its smoky aroma.
“I feel like the day I finally found where I wanted to put that lodge was the day I lost your mother.” He shifted almost painfully as the memory swam across the periphery of his vision. “You know I’ll always love your mother right? Well of course you do. I wish her nothing but the best. If things could have been different…” He lost himself in thought for a moment, but with a shake of the head corrected himself. “Things weren’t different, things never are, that’s the way life just happens to work out. You start down a new path of life and the old path becomes covered in thorns and shrubbery. The point is that your mother and I fell apart when almost everything with that lodge had fallen together. And then all my dreams, my planning, my blueprints…they told me they could never build a two story lodge because it wouldn’t float.”
His eyes grew misty and he laughed a small laugh, a note of understanding that life is an unfair and cruel mistress at times. “The anger in my voice that day could have brought a small town onto their knees. I don’t know how else I ever could have even gotten that crew to try. But they eventually broke down and they did try, and I’ll be damned if it hasn’t floated now for 7 years. They had never seen anything like that before, and since then they still haven’t. Since then my lodge is still the only one in the inlet with a top deck. It was a step into that dream that could have shot down anything, but I kept envisioning it the way I wanted it to be, and it eventually shifted into place.”
“Starting that lodge up was a nightmare. It was blissful and exhilarating while at the same time being the worst thing I had ever tried doing. Those first two years I was up for almost 20 hours straight a day, sometimes more. Those opening years taught me things about myself I didn’t even think I’d ever learn. But I got through it, and that lodge is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. It calmed me, restored my soul, brought me sanity through years I wasn’t sure I would get through. And I’ll tell you one thing, if that damn rig had sank in the water I would have sank too. I don’t know what I would do without that lodge.”
And of course the girl understood. The lodge, though hated at first for stealing her father away from her, from her first days of school and unsuccessful dates, had long ago been redeemed. At nineteen, she had escaped to the lodge when she could no longer bear the life she had spiraled herself into, and it had been working at that very lodge that had also saved her sanity and her control of her life. Her story had come before this one, and the father and daughter exchanged a knowing look that not many else in this world would understand. The struggle it takes for dreams to come true, the disappointment associated in letting yourself down, and the weight of the world falling off your back as everything fits into place. The acceptance of growing and not only recognizing and mourning your regrets, but letting them go so you can be a present part of the world, of your life.
The sun slid away from the clouds and cast a bright light over the two in the backyard. They both looked up and saw the same thing: a Canadian sky.
The girl spoke. “Dad, when the weather is like this and the sun looks like that it reminds me of days…” Cut off by the man leaning forward and putting a hand on her knee, she smiled.
“I know.” He said.
A bond unbreakable by the fast paced world and the moments that are taken for granted they both sat, looking up at the sky. A lifetime, a summer, a country had seemed to pass in just a few minutes. Her eyes had begun to water, and whether from tears or sunlight the girl was unsure. But as she spoke, her words were steady.
“I love you, Dad.”