Remember
Alec Sheffield
My father was the one who gave me my love for the outdoors: hiking, boating, fishing, rock climbing, camping. The two of us lived in Utah in a small trailer that he had bought when we moved here for his new job that didn’t pay and that he didn’t enjoy. Every night he still came home with a smile. He smiled because he was happy. Happy to be with me in our rundown RV trailer with a shower that rained icicles and a quicksand couch that pulled us in if we sat too long. Then there was me, the teen that wanted everything in the world and begged for my life to change in the blink of an eye. Beggars can’t be choosers my father told me every night when I complained about how our Hot and Fresh TV Dinner! was older than my father and was stone cold like a dead animal in the winter. I was seventeen at the time and I threw those words and advice out the broken window of our trailer thinking these words would never come back to me.
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I was young when my mom left us, too young to remember what she was like or how she looked. We lived in South Dakota during this time and there was little to do there when my father left me with a babysitter all day while he worked. The old woman smelled of tuna fish sandwiches, talked with a frog in her throat, and had the face of a sloth; Ms Jackie Therberg was her name. My father never seemed happy the days after mom left. He would sit on the couch, wearing an oil stained white t-shirt with knee high socks that were white when he bought them, now turned a faded yellow color, with a can of beer in his hand which he sipped on only during the commercials of his show.