June 21, 2010

Did your father ever make a special gift for you?

I don’t remember dad ever making a special gift for me but I do remember when he made special gifts with me. There was one Christmas in particular when I wanted to make a pencil holder similar to one I think that I must have made in school out of a piece of wood from a tree limb. So dad helped me go down by the pond and find a cedar tree from which we could cut a limb and then showed me how to cut it into pieces and how too take off the bark and drill the holes and then varnish them. They were fun to make and I spent many other hours learning things like that from dad. I went with him a lot of times to work during the summers and was able to help him repair various things in the schools and from that learned a lot of skills as well. Dad was a good teacher nit only by instruction that was planned but also by spur of the moment teaching and instructing while doing work around the farm. He was also very patient so it was not a problem to him when we made mistakes, he simply showed us again the correct way until we learned it.