Earliest Memories of My Father

One of my earliest memories of my late father is watching him work behind an easel in the barn that served as his artist’s studio behind our house in Allenstown, New Hampshire. A Ben Franklin stove roared nearby, providing the only heat in this un-insulated building that we called a barn. It was really just a large outbuilding with an abandoned chicken coop tacked on to the end. One winter I jumped off the roof. Snow hid the dangers that lurked on the ground. I ended up with a nail in my foot. That occasioned a tetanus shot, despite my howling resistance to injections. An apocryphal story...

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