INTERNATIONAL PULPWOOD QUEEN AND TIMBER GUY BOOK CLUB
with lists, groceries and the like. And a short letter to a shipmate of my uncle’s, asking to talk with him about Jim’s last moments when their destroyer sank off Newfoundland in 1942. My father built the house where I grew up. It’s in the photo: white stucco, green roof, red brick chimney for a fireplace we never used. He dug the foundation and cellar, framed it in, laid the cinder blocks, applied the stucco inside and out (the paint peeled off the walls in the winter, but it was cool in the summer), installed all the plumbing and electricity, and white-washed the outside almost every year. A few friends at the local Post Office where he worked doing maintenance, cleaning the toilets, and polishing the spittoons in the courtroom, helped him some, my brother says. The house still stands, and it provides shelter and warmth to another family, as it did for ours. I could never build a house; I couldn’t even square a board for a birdhouse in eighth-grade shop. So, this too is why I write, to create an edifice to memorialize what I’ve learned in life and leave something that will last for a while longer after I am gone. James Garrison
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SPECIAL SUMMER OFFICIAL PICK EDITION JUNE 2021
