Article by Willa Schendler Art by Talia Cardin
My dad tore up our back deck a few weeks after my younger brother left for college. He texted:
...also, I dismantled the deck, and had this whole pile of lumber in the driveway.
Came home to find Jerome Osentowski rifling through it.
It’s his 85th birthday today. He took it all.
My dad is going to replace the wood with plastic deck composite, which sort of disturbs me. Growing up, my dad would ritually retell the history of our house. It was built in the 50s (two families owned the house before mine) by a man named Mr. Redmond, who saw the beauty in crosscut logs that show the knots and age rings of trees. Our house is entirely made of wood, and the grace Mr. Redmond saw in the material is recalled in the golden panels on the walls, floors, and cabinets of our house that creak and snap as they expand and contract in the dry Colorado cold and heat.
I guess the deck’s fate was foretold in early summer, when, like a biblical plague, black flies began swarming, crawling along the deck for weeks, undeterred by various attempts made with the hose, bleach, soap, or cleansing sun and rain of early summer. It was like something out of a horror movie. What the fuck was under there?
Our house is partly warmed in the winter by a wood-burning stove. We buy wood in absurd bulk amounts, so much that it takes entire days of collective familial labor to chop and stack the piles of scrap logs deposited in our driveway via dump truck. We wait months for the fresh wood to dry, until the bright red innards of the logs that smell like smoke and sap are ready to burn.
It turns out that there were corpses abandoned and decaying under the old deck. As my dad progressed in the deck-replacement process, we received missives of small, lost things recovered in the excavation.
A hand-sized yellow plastic fish, covered in what appear to be human bite marks.
My dad:
Do you guys remember this little fish toy?
I found it under the deck.
My brother:
I don’t remember that.
It was probably rationed off to Willa.
I remember hours spent every summer rubbing viscous wood stain into the grains of wood on the deck, the railings of the porch, the lattice undersides of the front stairs. My dad explained how the sun dries out the wood, how the rich oil stain moisturizes it, how you can choose the color of the stain — vienna red, ochre yellow — to bring out its natural colors. Deck maintenance was often combined with painting the wooden shingles on the outside of the house. But, because no one in my family is attuned to detail except for my brother (who frequently “has to poop” during chore-like tasks), a careful observer might notice that my house is painted in two very distinct shades of red.
Interspersed with staining lessons was another tenet of wood-care: sanding. We selected sandpaper from the hardware store while I (to my dad’s annoyance with foods containing fat) ate popcorn. The hardware store is one of the only places that still sells circus peanuts: orange, styrofoam-textured candy shaped like an unshelled peanut, inexplicably flavored like artificial banana. Lessons in rare candies (somehow falling in a different category from fatty foods) accompanied home-repair projects. You start with rough, heavy-grain sandpaper, progressing to finer, more delicate grades as the job gets detailed. We sanded wood with sandpaper wrapped around blocks of cut-up two-by-fours for traction, or sometimes with an electric sander that, disturbingly, my parents also use to sand their heels.
Also rescued from under the deck is a felt dinosaur missing a few lower extremities, wearing a red hat my dad described as a fez — in Moroccan style, circa the Ottoman Empire.
My dad asks:
Does anyone recognize this dinosaur?
It has been living under our deck for over a decade.
The toys might have belonged to my brother and me, or the other families who lived in the house before us — we don’t remember them. Still, something about them brings up other moments on the wooden deck, nostalgia for a family and childhood that might be mine or someone else's, here and not here. Moments spent extracting bunched-up pine needles and dried leaves from the cracks in the deck with a butter knife. Or, the closely monitored progression of a robin’s nest from construction, laying of bright blue eggs, to the feeding of the baby birds with pre-chewed worms my brother and I watched being pulled out of the high desert dirt of our backyard, dusted with juniper berries and dead sage leaves.
My friend told me that after he, the youngest, left for college, his parents got into hard drugs and Burning Man. Composite wood isn’t so bad, but I’ll miss the staining.