The Drawing of a House She Never Saw

My father died before my daughter turned two; her memories of him are secondhand at best. But our family does 'heaven birthdays' — cake, candles, stories — because grief needs formats children can hold.

For his fourth heaven birthday, my daughter, then six, insisted on making him a card: 'a picture of his house so he doesn't get lost going home.' Sweet. She worked on it with unusual seriousness, tongue out, forbidding anyone to look.

The result: a stone cottage, green front door set oddly off-centre, a chimney with a visible kink — she'd drawn it crooked deliberately and defended the choice: 'it IS bendy' — a water barrel under the window, and a rope swing on a tree to the LEFT of the house, with one seat-board hanging by a single rope, 'because the other string broke and nobody fixed it.'

My father grew up in a stone cottage four hundred kilometres away, demolished for a road scheme in 1969, when he was nineteen. I have never seen it. There are, as far as our family knew, no photographs — his family was poor, cameras were an event.

My mother saw the card and had to leave the room. She came back with the only artifact from that era: a letter from my father's mother, decades old, which mentioned — I have it here — 'the chimney gone crooked again after the frost' and 'your father still hasn't mended the swing, one rope these two years, your sister swings on it anyway sideways.'

Green door? My mother couldn't say. So my daughter's card sat as an eerie near-match until my uncle, the last of that generation, visited months later. He looked at it for a long time without speaking. Then he said: door was green as long as he lived there — his father mixed the paint himself, wrong, twice — and the barrel stood under the window, and he'd fallen off that one-rope swing more times than he could count. Swinging sideways. Like his sister taught him.

We asked my daughter, gently, how she knew what to draw. She shrugged: 'Grandpa held the crayon sometimes.'