On Sticks

The last joy of my father’s life may have been picking up sticks. The stick shed in the backyard of the house where I live now is a running family joke, so named because the loosely walled structure - 15 feet long, 6 feet wide, 6 feet high - has held nothing but the wood and sticks my father gathered over almost two decades of living in this house in Lawrence, MA. There was nothing my father loved more than free wood, cut logs and branches, stumps, scrap wood, brush. He never threw any of it away. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a hoarder, but he was definitely a saver. I account for this tendency to “keep all the things” to his being raised a poor kid during the Depression. Pieces of rope and string, old and broken tools, lint from the dryer, egg cartons, half burned candles, leftover sandpaper, ribbon, wrapping paper, gift bags, scrub brushes, pails. He stored all of these things in the basement in bureaus with one or two of the drawers missing that he would take off the side of the road on trash days. He was a notorious garbage picker and occasional yard saler, endlessly frustrating my mother with the quantity and quality of his finds. But you could almost never fault him for his obsession because the joy he found in finding and having all the items that one might never know if you needed, well, this glee was something you could hardly deny a man finding things for free and for cheap. And it was true, if you ever needed a hammer or sixteen feet of twine or a clock or a full set of drill bits, you should definitely ask my dad first before you buy. Some of this was ironic because dad was the least mechanically inclined person you ever met. In general, his cluelessness was legendary. Fundamentally, he was more of a putterer and a tender of spaces. He loved to pick up things and move them around, and half clean a space. His collection of cleaning products, including the remnants of his fine collection of used sponges, exist to this day.

When my parents moved out of the house where I live now, my brothers and I spent hours removing and disposing of hazardous materials. I rented a good sized dumpster and friends came over to sledge hammer and dispose of all the broken and moldy bureaus, desks, and nasty old pressboard shelving units that held the two decades of stuff since they had moved into this house after dad’s retirement. Our family and friends laughed at the photo evidence of that dumpster filled to the brim with Jim Todd’s broken, dust-covered things.

My parents’ moving out took place at the mid-point of dad’s mid-stage Alzheimer’s disease, when he was still connected to reality but unable to process information, able to take directions but unable to follow through on tasks. My mother showed him a short video I took of Angell and Junior jumping on top of the pile in the dumpster, trying to smash the contents down to the brim so I wouldn’t be overcharged. She showed this to him jokingly, a testament to his years of trash picking. He was confused and crushed. “Why is she throwing all of my things away?” For days on end he asked my mother, “Why are they throwing away all of my things? I don’t understand why they are throwing away all my things.”

Fundamentally, I think my father struggled with abandonment and with fears of basic material security. I share these fears, even though I have no earthly evidence to suggest I am subject to either of these problems. But he did live with these realities as a child. So while in his fully present mental self we could joke with him about his obsession with trash picking, in his cognitive decline, over the years, these obsessions with being abandoned and not having enough were the primary preoccupations of his final years. It was devastating to see, after a life full of kindness, playfulness, and service, that the main files left in the cabinet of his mind were unresolved traumas.

But back to sticks. He no longer drove. In reality, the only place my dad ever really wanted to be, if given a choice, was at home. In his early stages of cognitive impairment, the backyard was his life. He was always “almost finished” with one project or another, designing and redesigning the rock borders of the gardens and filling the landscape with lawn ornaments mostly acquired on roadsides and at yard sales. Whether he had a project or not, you would always see my father walking around the yard, picking up sticks, fallen from the two large oaks whose canopy shades the backyard. You could never imagine how only two trees could supply so many sticks. But at the end of a windy storm, he would revel in finding each and every one, and throwing them in the stick shed. Prune the bushes - stick shed. Prune trees - stick shed. Help the neighbors with their yards, pick up their sticks - stick shed. Everywhere he walked, whether at home, or in the woods, if it was in his path or on the side of the road - sticks, sticks, sticks, sticks, sticks. Once he no longer had the capacity to tend to yard projects or redesign the rock borders, what he had left to touch the earth in a way he knew how, was to pick up sticks. Perhaps because his other primary love, besides rocks - which is a whole other story - was hiking, and the mountains were his other happy place, the sticks were a way of locating himself and tending to his environment.

During the pandemic lockdown, my sister-in-law noticed me through the windows in the spring, circumambulating the house, bending over, picking up a stick, walking a few more feet, picking up another. She was like, “Oh my gosh, Julie, you are becoming your Dad.” I hope so.

Inside the stick shed

When I moved into the house, it was one of my original intentions to empty the shed of the sticks and wood. It is a much larger task than anticipated. Behind the first four foot high, three foot of depth of literally nothing but fallen oak tree sticks, I discovered not just sticks, but bins and barrels, each one filled carefully with mostly evenly cut branches, from when he still knew how to use one of his sixteen old-school metal saws. When he could still drive, he would pick up not just trash, but the sticks and yard waste throughout the neighborhood and put it in his car to take home. “Why would anyone throw away good wood?” he’d say.

I have spent some time this past summer sifting and sorting my way through to the back of the shed. I probably have about another four feet of stick and wood to sort through. In a way, I am both ready for and not wanting the task to end. I have sorted much of what I can use into the garage. I have already had four full seasons of outdoor and indoor fires from stick shed kindling and wood. I probably have another two years worth of fires to burn. And this, of course, was the method to Dad’s stick madness. Why buy firewood when you don’t have to? If we head into another major depression and the entire economy crashes, I’ll have enough wood to heat the house for a while and to cook food on. And to cook food in, for that matter, because his old school camping gear was also legendary. If you need tent stakes, please let me know. 

I am sad to think of the endless kindling and wood coming to an end. In the end, the main thing my dad intended to do with his life was to provide for his family, to make sure we were secure. The end of the sticks in the shed feels like the slow ending of one of the visible ways he provided for us, and tended his home and the earth. 

For me, I imagine this story I am writing about sticks tends to deeper layers of meaning in the realms of abandonment and loss in my/our collective severance from land and trees and the places of our origins. This severing is the source of so much of our traumas. Dad was never much one for analytical depth and critical thinking, though. His concerns were much more mundane and grounded in practicality and love. Every day I hope to be more like him in these ways, moving from ideas and intellectual meaning to the embodied gestures of care and tending to people and to the earth.

I wrote this essay while on a writing retreat in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico in August 2022 with writing friends from the El Taller community in Lawrence, MA. I was working on my first novel and came up against an emotional wall that needed a crack in it. Thanks to all my writing friends who held space for me when I read this aloud to them on the day I wrote it.