Martha

Oh it doesn't look like much, that's for sure. It looks like it could use a disinfecting. But to me it's all about my father and the summer I turned 14.###My dad smoked a pack a day, and ended up with all kinds of crap covered with that Marlboro logo. Hats, jackets, t-shirts, patches. When it all combined he was a walking billboard. But us kids got over it; he was as unmovable as a mountain.###We usually spent summers outside, fishing, jumping into the swimming hole, having footraces through the fields, and generally causing a wild child ruckus. But that summer things started changing. I was the oldest, and I rather suddenly realized that I wasn't what teenage boys were interested in. They didn't want a girl with dirt under her fingernails and tangles in her hair. So I laid aside fishing trips with did and drinking from the spigot of that Marlboro cooler for trying out makeup and listening to trendy music. My father and I drifted apart, the way I guess all daughters do. I was growing up.###Late that fall my dad got sick, the doctors said cancer. We all watched him get grayer and thinner and weaker. It was horrible. He was too ill to go fishing next summer. And by the summer after that, he was gone.