Dad, today you start your seventh round of chemo. And while it’s not the super-funnest thing you’ll ever do, I’d like to remind you of a time when you were working on a house so hopeless you [silently] wished to burn it down.
That house was my special fixer-upper house, Dad. And I’m so very glad that you didn’t follow through with your initial response of kicking the house into a bricky heap while choking back Ugly Tears (uh, maybe now I’m confusing you with me.)
This picture kinda sums up what you were working with. Remember that fan? Yeah, that fan was roughly five and a half feet off of the ground. And totally hanging at an angle. It was the Fan Of Certain Decapitation. I called it The Highlander fan, remember that? (Yeahhh, you thought that was a nerdy joke then, too.) Well, you fixed that fan- as well as lifted it to a whopping height of about feet, making it slightly more suitable for the next family of borderline carny-folk to move right in. (And you placed six more ceiling fans in the house, giving us air all over the place! Sure, we couldn’t breathe all that well due to the boarded-up and shot-out windows, but you work with what you’ve got, right?)
Baseboards were boarded to bases. Things like nails spiking out at face height were secured behind actual trim. Locks were changed and storm doors were added- preventing random passersby from just waltzing on in. (Not sure who would’ve wanted to, but you ensured that they couldn’t, and that’s my point.)
And that door resting against that pocked wall in the photo? If you’ll recall, there were many, many doors resting against many, many pocked walls. You fixed ’em all- doors were hung, walls were spackled. By the time you left, the place looked a lot like a building where one could actually reside and not worry about things like rodents running in from the backyard. (At least not through the door.)
And that’s a wicked teensy fraction of the work you’ve done to this Money Pit [Of Dreams.] At the end of each day, your clothing would be so drenched in sweat and unknown/unmentionable substances that we all offered to bury your shirts in the backyard for you.
So Dad. You can do this chemo thing. Because- seriously, remember what was going on in the bathrooms? You’re tougher than chemo because you could handle what was going on in the bathrooms. Seriously.
And get better soon.
We have a lot more work to do.
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