The Smell of Cedar
Iʻd put only a small amount of mortar on the masonʻs hod, a square, flat metal plate with a round handle projecting from the bottom. To carry it level and not spill it with any amount was not easy for my thin five year old arms. Yet somehow I managed to bring it around to my adopted father on the side of the house without spilling one thick drop.
I tilted the hod and the heavy grey rocky oat-mealy gluey stuff slid onto his hod. He grabbed his trowel and used it all up buttering two bricks and laying them perfectly with masterly taps of his trowel. I returned to the mixer for more. I canʻt remember how many times I made that trip before my young muscles were worn out, but he waited patiently to lay just two bricks at a time..
It was 1957 and the space race was on. Weʻd all stood together in the back yard to see Sputnik, the first artificial satellite slowly float through the dark starry sky of Colorado. Heʻd gotten me a toy rocket and laughed, saying “good shot” when I broke the light bulb hanging over our kitchen table.
Five years later I launched our neighborsʻ pet mouse to 7,000 feet in a two stage rocket. Almost thirty years later, I was able to line out and build a cinder block laundry/bathhouse in Rolling Thunderʻs Native American community in Carlin, Nevada with no help or plans. “No plans? No problem”, I said when asked.
My father had taught me well. In one room the basement of the home heʻd also built us a 64 sq. ft. train set, with “lakes” of mirrors with a bit of blue paint smeared on them, tunnels and a Lionel engine that made smoke when you put a tiny drop of oil in itʻs smokestack.
Over the years to follow, the basement became fully My Territory. One room for the snooker table, one for the chemistry lab, one for the darkroom. Other than the train set, my favourite room was the walk-in aromatic cedar closet we had also built together. To this day even the smell of aromatic cedar reminds me of the hours I spent sitting in that closet.
Sitting on the floor in that closet with the sliding doors closed, alone in the dark became my refuge when times got hard. And they did get hard., as my father died of a heart attack two weeks after we moved in.
The funeral was followed 6 years later by a bad re-marriage. After driving my mother mental and putting her in a hospital an hour away, my evil Jack Mormon step-father got power of attorney, double-mortgaged the home, took the T-bird and left town, never to be seen again.
Institutionalization and electroshock therapy changed my mothersʻ brain from that of a top saleswoman and lumberyard accountant to that of a truck-stop waitress and later, a maid who worked until 2002.
My sister and I went to work soon after to assuage the poverty of a single mother. As sheʻd also forgotten how to cook, we did the cooking and worked after school, also for fifty cents an hour at a Mexican-American restaurant. We all managed put food on the table, which now resided in a cold and small apartment on the edge of town.
With no aromatic cedar closet.
