We’re in the garage preparing for a long-overdue run to the tip.
Logs are piled in scant preparation for a hard winter that may well be more severe than we care to think about.
My son hauls a filthy sports bag down from a shelf next to boxes of an album I made a decade ago and for which I overestimated demand.
“What’s in here do you think?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” I tell him, although I recognise the bag as mine.
“I think it’s a set of snow chains for a Land Rover,” he says with the same misguided confidence that caused me to order the hundreds of CDs that we’re facing.
Even oiling the zip we can’t get the bag undone which serves only to heighten the sense of anticipation.
“Get me a Stanley knife,” I say.
I cut a strip down the length of the stubborn zip to reveal the contents.
There are christening cards from when my son was born, photos of me in a band during the 1980s, terrible songs I wrote held together in a manilla folder, a set of my mother’s rosary beads, a small prayer book, and two perfectly preserved newspapers.
“Look at the date on this,” I say to my son.
He takes one of the papers from me.
“The day I was born,” he says, “The Daily Telegraph?”
“I saw the world differently then. Do you want to keep it?”
He says he does.
“Don’t make a thing about it though because I’m not sure I saved one when Beth was born,” I tell him.
He laughs and says something about the first child being the most important that I don’t hear properly but have already heard countless times before.
Looking through a few of his christening cards I feel a pang of guilt that his sister wasn’t christened either.
From the kitchen, my daughter shouts “Bye” as her boyfriend arrives to collect her. Under his breath, my son says, “Yeah bye Beth, thanks for all your help.”
I jump to her defence, as always, pointing out that, pre-COVID, my son was never home at the weekend and so wasn’t here to help with anything.
My son has stopped trying to understand why I stick up for her so often.
My son, like me, is well over six feet tall and laid back. Neither of us is confrontational because we’ve rarely needed to be. Even as a child he was pretty even-tempered.
My daughter was volcanic. Always putting up walls if she felt in any way attacked, the ferocity of her door slamming and the volume of her screaming something impressive to look back on and, at times, pretty unpleasant to have experienced.
I used to think that I just attracted feisty, combative women that I barely knew how to handle and was often afraid of confronting. Then Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and helped me to see another dimension that I had never considered.
I didn’t know much about Ginsburg when I was reading her obituary in the papers, but something caught me because instead of working my way through an extensive list of chores I watched “RBG” on Netflix.
It made me think about Black Lives Matter and how sexism is its quietly spoken cousin. But most of all, it made me think about my mother, my wife, and my daughter and how, rather than simply being feisty women, they are just women who have grown used to fighting.
My son picks up a broom and prepares to sweep the floor of the garage and pile the last bits of rubbish on the ever-increasing pile.
“Leave that,” I tell him. “I’m going to get Beth to do it when she’s back.”
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