Notes from the Potting Shed

 📜 A Quiet Note for Father’s Day

by Virgil Twobyfour

It is early still, and the world is very gentle.

The sun has risen with all the dignity of an old horse standing up from a nap, and the dew on the grass sparkles like the village bakery's sugar tray after a particularly exuberant doughnut collapse. The sparrows are squabbling in the ivy again, a reassuring racket like clumsy love letters in Morse code.

I’ve taken my tea out to the old bench by the elder tree, where the breeze smells faintly of honeysuckle and bicycle grease. A bumblebee has landed on my thumb three times already, and each time it seems disappointed to find it isn’t a dandelion. I know the feeling.

Today is Father’s Day. A day for remembering, or forgetting, or simply being, depending on what your heart has room for. I never knew my father particularly well. He was a fleeting sort of man. Always on the trail of mysterious eggs or “improving the barometric honesty of fencing wire,” whatever that meant. I do remember the smell of him, though. Pipe tobacco, peat soap, and the faint whiff of unanswered questions. He taught me how to tie a good knot, how to listen to trees, and how not to get caught borrowing livestock. Useful things, in their way. He never lingered long, but he left impressions like thumbprints on soft wax.

I never had children of my own, not in the usual sense. I did once spend a worrying weekend in 1963 believing I had fathered a set of identical triplets in Wrexham, but it turned out to be a clerical error involving a valentine’s card and a particularly friendly choir. Still, I’ve planted a good many things. Cabbages and ideas, marrow seedlings and tall tales. I’ve watched them all take root and misbehave in their own peculiar directions. Perhaps that is a kind of fathering, in a roundabout sort of way.

There have been the children of others too. Neighbours' little ones who used to drop in for jam sandwiches and whispered ghost stories, now grown and occasionally writing to tell me they still remember how I used to say that nettles have souls and that teaspoons can smell fear. There was young Declan Molesworth, who would sneak into my shed and rearrange all my tools into alphabetical order until I taught him how to detect ley lines using two knitting needles and a suspicious mind. He’s a geophysicist now, or possibly a medium. Hard to tell from his postcards.

And dear little Myrtle Hesketh, who solemnly insisted at the age of seven that she was a reincarnated badger and asked if she could hibernate in my compost heap. I gave her an old sleeping bag and a lecture on the spiritual integrity of humus. She now runs a rewilding project and only occasionally writes to ask whether I still have the bones.

These young people, strange and dazzling, have wandered through my life like moths through a lantern beam. Some stayed a while. Some flickered and flew off to find their own glows elsewhere. I don’t know what lasting mark I made, if any, but I like to think I was a peculiar sort of constellation for them. Not a guiding light exactly, but maybe something oddly shaped that made them look up and wonder.

If you’ll forgive me a moment’s musery, I think being a father - or a mother, or a person who stands tall in the world on someone else’s behalf - has very little to do with shared blood and a great deal to do with presence. With listening. With knowing when to say something, and knowing when to simply sit beside a storm and let it pass. I’ve known those who longed to be fathers but could not, who carried that ache with such grace and quiet humour it broke my heart. I’ve met others who stepped up without fanfare to raise children they hadn’t made, folding them into their lives like extra verses in a half-remembered lullaby. And, yes, I’ve known folk who were let down by the men meant to guide and love them. There are few silences deeper than the absence of a good father. My heart goes out to those who sit with that silence today.

Whatever shape your fatherhood takes, or took, or never managed to take at all - whether you raised children, mentored strays, adopted, fostered, taught, or simply offered shelter and your better instincts to someone who needed them - it matters. I think all fathering, at its best, is a kind of stewardship. You tend what you did not create. You make room for someone else to thrive.

If you are a father, or have one, or had one, or never did but wish you had, or aren’t quite sure, may today bring you a moment of quiet kindness. May you find peace in the rustle of the leaves, comfort in the clink of a teaspoon against a mug, and maybe the memory of a hand on your shoulder, even if it's only the breeze passing through.

Let us be gentle with one another, and with ourselves.

And if you're very lucky, may your boiled eggs peel cleanly, your socks match without effort, and your heart feel just the right weight in your chest.

With affection and a faint smell of elderflower,
Virgil Twobyfour
Potting Shed Philosopher, occasional borrower of time, keeper of small and unimportant truths