A Dustpan for Christmas

     I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7 or even younger when Daddy got a dustpan for Christmas. That’s all. Just a dustpan. I remember thinking what a disappointment that must be for him. We children were never disenchanted at Christmastime. We probably didn’t expect much but we always were thrilled and excited. Daddy wasn’t home for Christmas every year. Sometimes he had to stay out with his sheep. If he came home, it would be just before Christmas and then he would have to go back out. The two years before he died, he was out on the Arizona Strip all winter. That’s how I sort of know how old I was when he got a dustpan for Christmas.  I was 10 when he died, 9 and 8 when he was on the Arizona Strip so I couldn’t have been more than seven years old. It seemed to my young mind that when he was home for Christmas so seldom that he should get something he really wanted. Funny thing, Mama probably didn’t get anything for Christmas and I don’t remember being concerned about that.

Every Christmas since, I think about Daddy getting only a dustpan for Christmas.

When our basement was flooded for the umpteenth time in September and we decided to throw the carpet squares away, Amy put foam pads down in the basement. She took my only dustpan downstairs. I’ve got vacuums large and small but sometimes I like to sweep the floor and use a dustpan to pick up the crumbs and dirt. I asked for a new dustpan for my birthday, for Thanksgiving, and finally for Christmas. Santa Claus let me down.

That’s when I openly started telling the story about my sheepherder daddy getting a dustpan for Christmas those many years ago. Now it didn’t seem like such a gloomy gift. It became a coveted entity, worth more than silver or gold. Maybe Daddy loved it. I don’t know what he would do with a dustpan in a tent or sheep wagon. It probably was something Mama needed.

I was young and didn’t know much about sacrifice then. It was just before World War II ended. The economy would pick up later but things were pretty grim during the war, following the Great Depression. The sheep business was faltering. Mama and Daddy had secretly talked about selling out and moving to Idaho where their cousin and sister had bought a dairy farm. Daddy’s brother, married to Mama’s sister, sold his sheep and bought cattle.

In 1947, Daddy was killed while herding his sheep. He had been sick with pneumonia and was very weak but felt he had to tend his sheep. Gathering his sheep on a Sunday morning, he slipped and fell in the Orderville Gulch area of the Zion Narrows.

This is not a story about a dustpan. DeRay ordered my dustpan on Amazon and it came today. This is a story about a father who took his responsibilities so seriously that he would not let his family down. The dustpan is our common bond and helps me remember to honor him and try to be more like him. Even 70 years later.