My father’s voice sounds like Nick Nolte gargling marbles. Dad’s almost 91; I think of him as my baby. Same flutter in my heart when I suspect something is wrong, same crushing weight of responsibility and tenderness. At a glance I can tell his mood, health, or disposition. Today, two steps into Dad’s kitchen, I know he likely has pneumonia.

“It’s a head cold, not a chest cold,” he says. “I’m fine.”

Unlike a baby, Dad can choose his own fate. A common cold can turn deadly within hours: he could drown in his own juices if his lungs fill. His emphysema is from decades of breathing coal and diesel fumes, not to mention smoking for 50 years.

My sister and I rarely visit Dad at the same time, but this Saturday morning we’re here together to decorate for Christmas. Geralynn and I tag-teamed our way through our mom’s illness and death. Now we’re doing the same for Dad.

While he showers, Geralynn puts together his pint-sized artificial tree, and I call Dad’s home-care hotline. When I finally get a real person, I have to think before I give Dad’s date of birth.

I’ve only said my own or my son’s birthday on the phone to a medical professional. I pause. “January.” Another pause. “18.” 1930 or 1926—which is Mom and which is Dad?

“1926,” I say.

The nurse says, “At his age, he needs to come in.”

I don’t bother telling her Dad’s other ailments, one of which might have killed a weaker man: congestive heart failure, diabetes, chronic gout, sleep apnea.

“He thinks he’s better today,” I tell her. “But he sounds juicy.”

I’ve heard our home-care nurse use this word a few times when she listened to Dad’s lungs.

“We’ll never get him to urgent care,” I say.

This nurse questions me about his temperature, oxygen level, color of his sputum. They are all normal, which makes me feel a little better.

When I was a child, Saturday was for baths in our family. As the youngest of eight, I got to bathe first. A little more hot water was added for the next oldest, David, then Geralynn, Joe Junior, and on up. Then Mom, and finally, Dad. My parents both grew up on farms without indoor plumbing; they never stopped seeing running water as the tremendous commodity it is. There were many perks to being the “baby” of the family—doted upon by older siblings, adored by parents who knew I’d be the last—but bathing in my own water was at the top of that list.

When my mom got too sick to care for herself, Saturday mornings were for bathing her, first on my own and then with Geralynn’s help.

Two things Dad did when the last kid left home (me!): ordered cable TV and installed a shower in his bathtub. I think this was so he’d never have to bathe in someone else’s water ever again.

Today after Dad’s shower, I tell him about the nurse hotline.

“Why would you call them?” he asks, incredulous that we’d bother anyone on a Saturday because of a mere “head cold.”

Palliative care, a step before hospice, means we have a nurse available via phone 24 hours a day. I remind him how fast a cold can become pneumonia.

“Your nurse will check on you Monday,” I say.

“I’ll live,” he says.

That’s his answer to pretty much anything, including the day he almost severed his thumb with a power saw or the time gout prevented him from walking.

Next on his agenda: Dad sends Geralynn and me to the garage rafters to find his toy train set, which he wants to pass onto a great-grandson. Geralynn climbs Dad’s old wooden ladder while I hold both sides. I stare at her calves while she looks through box after box, and we take turns talking each other into believing Dad really is a little better today. After much poking around in layers of junk—some stacked neatly up here maybe since before I was born—Geralynn finds the train box.

For Dad, giving this train for Christmas is a gesture of kindness. He doesn’t have a train for each great-grandchild, but he recognizes which train-loving three-year-old will appreciate his gift the most.

I spot an old washtub, the sort of farm relic that Pinterest-obsessed 30-somethings search eBay in order to accessorize a rented barn for an authentic “country wedding.” Weeks ago, Dad said I could have it.

“Take everything,” he quipped.

He stays in the house most of the time now. Each Sunday morning as he shuffles to my car for a ride to church he glances at the disorganized mess his garage has become and winces a little.

Geralynn carries the train inside, and I follow her with the Dura-zinc-alloy-coated Wheeling washtub. Dad sits at the kitchen table in his bathrobe, wheezing and reading the newspaper. His hair is slicked back and wispy curls form around his enormous ears. It seems the bigger Dad’s ears grow, the less he can hear. I hold up the washtub.

“It’s got my name on it,” I tease.

I point at “P. See” written in marker across the side. Dad chuckles. We both know it was signed by my grandfather, Peter See, long before 1970 when he died of a heart attack. I was two; Dad was around my age now—mid-40s.

The See’s tradition was to name the eldest or youngest son after that child’s grandfather. I was supposed to be a Peter, which my parents could have named one of my two older brothers. Perhaps they were convinced they’d have more boys, rather than six daughters and two sons.

“That little tub’s where we all took a bath,” Dad tells me.

I know the story, but I listen again.

“Ma heated water on the stove for our Saturday night bath in the kitchen. When we got older my ma talked my pa into getting a bigger galvanized tub. Joey’s got that one in his garage.”

I make out the faded sticker—“exclusive longer life coating.” Some of that surely rubbed off on Dad. Why do I want this family relic so much? I live in a tiny house and bring home only what I can put to everyday use. I have no idea what I will do with this washtub, but I know I must have it.

“Take whatever else you want out there,” Dad says.

Until my mom got sick, Dad didn’t talk much. For most of their 65 years together, Mom’s constant chatter drowned out anything he might have to say. When Alzheimer’s took her voice, Dad finally talked. Like a radio dial turned to another station, for the last ten years he offered us daily news reports and other in-depth stories from throughout his life.

At home, I set my new treasure on top of my waist-high hot tub to scrub away decades of dirt. While hosing it down and soaping it up, I couldn’t help but think of the size difference between this two-foot-by-two-foot metal tub and my three-person-jetted-spa: a clear example of the gluttony of my generation. Now I soak in a pool of
hot water with my husband just for fun.

This tub was used on my grandparent’s farm for washing clothes and bodies from 1924 to 1935, give or take. Then it spent perhaps another 15 years in the barn, occasionally brought out to hold ice and beer or to make ice cream in the summer. Was that when Grandpa Pete wrote his name on the tub? Did he loan it out to neighbors?

My grandparents moved to town around 1950, to a house with indoor plumbing. The tub moved with them. Was it filled with grandchildren’s toys? Was it a vegetable bin? At some point, it was handed down to my dad, before or after his father died. Then it was stored in Dad’s garage rafters for as long as I can remember, holding only he knows what. Camping gear? Strings of tangled Christmas lights? Styrofoam plates? I’d like to think Dad was drawn to this artifact’s story, as I am, though most likely back then he took anything his father offered him for his own garage—Dad’s domain. He built it himself in 1967, the year before I was born. For most of my life, he escaped there, to tinker or fix or just get away from a nagging wife and eight boisterous kids. This washtub was stored there, until Saturday when Geralynn and I found it, along with a toy train and 500 Styrofoam plates still in their wrappers. Before Dad retired as “yard master” of the Soo Line Railroad he had lunch each weekday with Amoco Plastics factory workers, all of whom are long gone. For my dad, nearly everyone he once knew is gone. Even our Avon lady is dead.

Why is Dad still saving these 30-year-old freebie foam plates? Why do I ask? He talks me into taking some of them home. That’s how it often goes with Dad: if there’s anything I really want, I also have to leave with something he’s getting rid of.

I stack 200 or so plates in the corner of his dining room.

“Let’s see if you can use these up before you die,” I tease.

He smiles. I’ll see him within 24 hours, and he’ll be in the same robe, sitting in the same spot at the table, reading tomorrow’s paper. I visit most mornings; I know one day I will come in to find him dead in bed or slumped at the table or motionless in his napping chair.

At home scrubbing this tub the size of a beer cooler, I can’t help but say out loud: Adults bathed here. I imagine my grandparents’ lean bodies during those Depression years on the farm when they birthed four children in five years. Babies and toddlers, two at a time, soaked in this tub. In the winter it was surely placed in front of the wood-burning kitchen stove. In the summer it was out in the grass, just before the fields began. As the kids got older, the youngest bathed first, then more hot water poured from the tea kettle, another child, more water. I see now: a family tradition.

I scrub and think of Dad’s story: how he once farted during a bath, and his older brother Jim cried because he did not want to dip even a toe into that same water. Their mother, who carried a leather strap on her apron to punish naughty boys or maybe just for crowd control, refused to give Jim new water. He went two weeks without a bath. Jim was “Jimmy” then; Dad was “Joey”—“Irish twins” born 53 weeks apart.

Uncle Jim died a month ago. He was buried with the steel ring he cherished since the autumn day when he met a girl at a church picnic, selling them from a ring toss booth. He was married to her for 68 years. I didn’t hear this story until I read his obituary, but I do know the key to a beloved’s heart is sometimes small and round. I wonder if he ever told any of his nine children about their Uncle Joe farting in the bath water.
Sometimes it makes me melancholy to think of my father as just a kid. Dad tells me his childhood stories, and it’s almost as if I’ve missed out on part of him by some fault of my own. I was disinterested or somehow unkind or ignorant. Irrational thoughts, I know. Or maybe I had to get this old to appreciate the boy in my father, part of the peculiar role reversal that is caring for an aging parent.

Scrubbing this tub, I feel like I do when I change my dad’s sheets each Saturday morning. Something about these domestic motions of women who came before me:
washing whatever needs washing, unfurling crisp sheets upon a bed and knowing it’s a treat on Saturday night to climb into clean sheets with a clean body.

I strip Dad’s bed, and I swear I can smell my mother, hint of Avon Rose Water, in their wool blankets. She’s been dead four years now.

I am always struck by the tininess of their “built in” double bed. No box spring, just a wooden platform and headboard Dad crafted by hand in 1955. Two adults and sometimes two children fit in this bed. I was one of them, sleeping in the small space between my parent’s pillows and the clock-radio-and-black-and-white-snapshot-covered-headboard. I didn’t have my own bed then, just floated from room to room, a child with the ability to fit in spaces no one over age five could possibly imagine, like bats and certain mice.

I can’t help but think that Mom’s DNA is on this bedding, skin long sloughed off. Or a strand or two of her hair is caught in the crook of a drawer. She is surely in the wall-to-wall carpet she walked upon for decades and vacuumed with her fancy Kirby which the door-to-door salesman guaranteed for life. She is still in that vacuum bag. And in my parents’ shared hairbrush. She’ll be in this house as long as Dad is here.
In those gray days after Mom’s funeral, I wondered: Who am I, living in a world without a mother?

Someday soon I won’t have a father. Will I be a 40-something orphan? Ludicrous, but it crosses my mind. Simultaneously I wonder if my son will ever curate my life as I have done with my parent’s relics or will I be like those abandoned family photos you see in an antique store? Bigger still: whatever we do to stave off that quickening heartbeat—eat our raw veggies and give up smoking— we’re still reminded “I’m-dying, too.” Ancient, deep, and unavoidable.

I turn back to my project at hand. This washtub, it smells only of metal: steely strength of lug nuts and blood. I scrub away the grime of my father’s garage and remnants of my kin’s DNA, traces of stories none of us knows we leave behind.

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