Dad's Room

The house I grew up in, has been sold. It was on the market for a day before we got an offer. We countered. They accepted. The house has full finished basement. One room in the basement has been my dad's workroom for nearly as long as we've lived there. Yesterday my brother, SIL, my dad's best friend, and I started packing up my dad's workroom. I cried. There are a lot of memories in that room. My dad had every nook and corner filled -- office supplies, war games, old board games we had played as kids, models of ships, planes, and cars, old sci-fi and fantasy books and magazines. An old copy of the Lord of the Rings books, Horatio Hornblower, etc. Shelves and shelves of Civil War reference books, maps, photos, and other assorted material. There were also reference material on the Napoleonic wars, and World Wars I and II. There were boxes and boxes of Magic The Gathering cards, Star Trek Cards, Star Fleet Battles, and more. There shelves, boxes, butter and coffee containers full of miniture lead figures. Most unpainted, but a lot of them he hand painted. The figure's are maybe an inch high and he painted eyes, mustaches, and mouths on them. We found certificates of appreciation and world's greatest dad's thingy's stuck in a folder, protected. We found things of us kids there. Memories he kept sacred and those he wanted to escape. It was hard, but exciting and interesting at the same time. It was my dad's inner santcum. His private retreat. A place none of us dared go into without his okay. Not even Barb did. In a house where him and his kids were slowly erased, this was all dad's. The walls were covered with shelves and those that weren't, were covered with jokes. I remember him sitting on his stool, looking through a lit, magnifying glass painting civil war figures with paint brushes with maybe one or two bristles in them. Battle flags were painted on kleenex and then wrapped around wire as thin as mechanical pencil lead. Maybe thinner.

I missed him all over again.