The Birdhouses Dad Sold by Noon

What Dad built

I should say what these were, because from the outside, forty birdhouses might sound like a hobby that got out of hand.

Dad worked out of the Galesburg railroad yard for thirty-eight years, on the Burlington Northern line and then on its merged successor. He started as a track laborer and finished as a foreman, and most nights he came home with his hands the color of creosote.

When he retired at sixty-six, he did not know what to do with himself. He lasted about nine days.

My mother, Anna, finally put a pencil in his hand and told him to go build something that was not a mess for her to clean up.

The first one he made had a crooked roof. One side hung a quarter inch lower than the other because he had cut the rafters from the wrong end of the board.

He hung it anyway, on the fence post by the kitchen window. A pair of wrens moved in that May.

Mom watched them from the sink all that summer. She told everybody she knew. She said it was the first thing Emmett Gosch ever made that came with a family.

After that he could not stop. Every fall when the corn came off, he cleared his workbench and started cutting cedar, and by March the shelves in the garage were full.

He built each house for exactly one kind of bird. Bluebirds got a hole an inch and a half across. Chickadees and wrens got an inch and an eighth, small enough to keep the sparrows out.

He painted the outsides in bright colors so people would stop for them, and he left the insides raw, because paint on the inside can make a nestling sick.

He never put in a perch. On the bottom of every one he wrote, in carpenter’s pencil, the name of the bird and the year.

He sold a few every autumn and gave away the rest to anybody who admired the fence post. He lost his wife eleven years ago and kept building.

Here is what I understood standing in that gravel lot. They were not junk. And my sister had not known they were not junk.

She knew he built them. Everybody knew. But she had always seen them as his clutter, a thing Dad did out in the garage, as ordinary to her as the smell of sawdust on his shirt.

She had never counted them in December. I had, and I had never told her what it meant to him, because it never came up. That is how a family loses track of what it holds.