sagebeforeuse

[sagebeforeuse]

the baseboards

The man was in his backyard watering his grass on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The backyard door was open but the screen door was closed, preventing mosquitoes and flies from entering into the house. The man could faintly hear ‘You Gotta Be’ by Des’ree playing from the small portable speaker he had sitting on kitchen table inside the house. 🎶 myyyy ohhh myyyy 🎶 he quietly sang - might even have really tried to hit that note, had he not turned around to the sound of his son tramping down the stairs and into the kitchen. He could see the top of his head from the kitchen window above the sink and it was enough for him to know that his son was in a mood.

“Hey little man, what are you doing?” the man asked as he thought to him self that he will definitely have to play that song again because he was missing the chorus - his favourite part of the song - which, if you know the song, you know it demands you to drop everything and listen; like, really listen. “looking for an old cloth”. “Those would be in the drawer beside the stove” the man answered back, reaching into his pocket to pull out his phone and hit pause on the song. This song is too good to just have playing in the background without him really giving it the attention it deserves. “Mom wants me to clean the baseboards in every room right now” the son said to his father in an attempt to bond over how ridiculous that request was. “It’s not enough that i’m cleaning on a Saturday, but the baseboards? Why does that even matter?” The father laughed a little and told him to come out to the backyard.

The son complied as he open the screen door to join his father in the backyard. “You wanna help me set up the hammock from the shed instead?” the dad asked. “We were thinking of called Nasir and Fatima over for a little backyard bbq later in the day and we could definitely use that”. The son looked at his father with that look. You know the “r u dumb?” look? Of course he didn’t say it, but you know damn well he thought it. “No, I don’t want to do that. I wanna sit around and not do anything. It’s Saturday, I get two days off school and it’s bad enough I have homework but now I have to clean as well? Don’t you guys want to sit around as well? Why is it so important that the house is clean? Are baseboards really THAT important?” 

The dad smiled at his son with his hands on his hips as he looked inside the house through the screen door. “I hated cleaning the house when I was your age as well. I always had something better to do. I’m sure you do as well. The truth is, the baseboards are everything to us. So is this” he said, pointing to the grass in the backyard. “So is every mirror, every faucet, every single baluster under the railings. Man, the truth is, for you it’s a house you’re growing up in. It’s your starting point, it’s everything you’ve known so far. For us though, it’s every thing we had to do to get it. To get here. Not just every single dollar we had to save put aside to afford it. It’s not the years of low budget ‘having take-out in the back seat’ dates in order to save money or the nights we decided to stay in and watch movies instead of going out. It’s all of it” he said, leaning over the deck’s railing. 

“It’s the other work we had to put in as well. The work we had to put in to us to make sure we could be here one day. It’s the times we fought, it’s the times we made up. It’s the times we decided it was better to spend time apart. The times we were sure we were done with one another but still kept working on ourselves hoping that it would lead us back to one another. It’s the time we spend growing up together fantasizing about the house we would one day have together. We dreamed of having a kitchen one day, one where we could make pancakes on the weekends. One where we could cook dinners for one another, where we could stock the cabinets with our favourite snacks.

“Between the two of us there were a gajillion different homes we imagined, all with different furniture, styles, and layouts, but the one thing all of them had in common was that it had us. We have that now, and man, it wasn’t easy. I know it’s just stuff for you, but for us it’s all the work, the lessons, the heartbreaks, the uncertainty, and the tears - both happy and sad. Sad when we thought we would never get to share this with one another and happy when we realized we finally had it. This is everything to me. All of it. This is the fruit of our labour, and let me tell you little man, it’s really sweet.” 

The son was a little taken aback as he saw tears swell up in his father’s eyes. He had never seen his father cry except for when his own father had passed away a few years prior. “Damn I wasn’t expecting all that” the son said in an attempt to lighten the mood. It was weird for him to see his father like that and he didn’t know how to act. “You are a part of that journey y’know” the father said wiping away the tears, smiling and his son. “You’re a part of this”. The father kissed the boy’s forehead, reached into his hand and grabbed the cloth the son had picked out from the cabinet. “Finish watering the grass and then go enjoy the rest of your Saturday. I’m gonna go upstairs and clean the baseboards with my wife”.'

“By the way this is a kitchen cloth, she would’ve killed you if you used this on the baseboards” he said laughing to his son as he open the screen door to step into the house.