My father built the bench when my husband and I bought our first house. He had some oak left from a project, and put the bench together quickly.
Too quickly, he always said: One board on the seat stuck up slightly at one end. The first person who sat on the bench would sit on the “good end,” leaving the uneven end for the next person.
Eventually, a beach towel migrated outside, and we’d fold it up as a seat cushion. I spent a lot of time bringing that towel inside to wash, as it got left out in all kinds of weather. Starting out in vivid crayon colours, by the time I threw it out years later, it had faded to the palest pastels.
The uneven board bothered Dad. After my mother died, he came over every Sunday to spend the day and have dinner with us. Dad would check out the bench, shake his head, and say, “I should fix that one of these days.” We always told him we didn’t even notice the uneven board.
He also fretted a little that the bench was oak, especially how it weathered over the years.
“Should have used cedar,” he would say. And I would always reply, “I like how rustic it looks.”
At one point, it got a bit too rustic and wobbled if you sat on it. My husband nailed some brace pieces to the underside. Dad was slowing down by then, and if he noticed, he didn’t say anything.
Nearly a year after Dad died, the bench collapsed one October day. We had stopped being able to sit on it, but I liked how it looked in our garden, and I loved it as a reminder of Dad.
Our two daughters, now grown and married with families of their own, cried when I told them the old bench was gone, and I cried with them.
That Christmas, my daughters and I all got wooden keepsake boxes. My husband had saved some of the bench’s boards. He asked a local artisan to make the boxes, and to keep the look rustic by not sanding the wood to perfection. He also asked the artisan to tolerate adding a design flaw: Each box had one board not quite even with the rest.
