May 2024

My flash nonfiction piece “Dad’s Weights” was published in The Keepthings site. If you haven’t followed this wonderful site on Instagram or Substack, I urge you to do it. The essays about things we keep from the people we’ve lost are wonderful.

If you aren’t on Instagram or Substack, you can read it here.

When my friends ask what kind of work my father did, I say, “You know those signs on the highway that say Truck Scales Ahead? He fixed those.” He was a mechanic who specialized in the repair of industrial scales. These six brass weights, which now sit on my fireplace mantel, were among those he used to calibrate and balance scales that took the measure not just of semis, but of car parts, paint cans, hot dogs, Jell-O, pills. You name it, he could fix the scale that weighed it.

We lived near Chicago, an industrial giant of a city. Starting in the 1960s, long before scales went digital, Dad worked in all sorts of factories. Pharmaceutical companies, Frito-Lay, Oscar Mayer. My favorite was General Mills because he often brought home bags of Bugles fresh off the conveyor belt and still warm. But there was also Darling’s Rendering Plant, a factory that turned animal waste into oils and fertilizer. Once a month Dad drove his big red pickup there. I could picture him descending the ladder to tinker with dials and gauges, the truck pit awash with blood and guts and rat droppings.

When my brother, Paul, was a teenager, he worked with Dad over the summer. Paul never tired of describing the smell at Darling’s, but Dad never talked about it. He just came home, same as every day, and cleaned up. (Though no matter how hard he scrubbed, his hands were stained from his work, and he could never loosen the grease from under his fingernails.)

The eldest girl, I was usually cooking dinner as Dad drove up our driveway, gravel popping under his tires. He’d come in the back door, set his lunchbox on the kitchen counter and say, “Hello, Daughter. That smells good. What’s for dinner?” before heading for the shower. I’d roll my eyes at the way he claimed me as his, something I valued little as a teenager.

Dad was born in 1927. He was two years old when the stock market crashed. A year later, his father died. Unable to care for her children, his mother put my father and his siblings in an orphanage. I don’t believe Dad ever truly recovered from that early abandonment. For the rest of his life, he struggled to express emotions. But what he couldn’t put into words, he expressed with the labor of his calloused, hardworking

hands. Having lost his original family, he built his own, marrying my mother in 1954, having us four kids and making a life for the six of us.

In his eighties, my father developed dementia and suffered a stroke that left him unable to walk. Visiting him in the nursing home, I watched him sitting in his wheelchair, shaky and unsure, this man who had driven all over the Midwest in his big red truck, who had hefted toolboxes and wielded tools, who could balance a scale one brass weight at a time, who’d done work that was at times unpleasant but never complained. 

Only after he died did I care about the weights. The six I kept became symbols of the family my father created from the life he was given. I imagine the largest one as Dad, the man I had to learn to appreciate. If you ever want to take the measure of a good man, all you have to do is look at that solid, sturdy weight.

—Lisa Rizzo

“The Big Snow”, an excerpt from my memoir in progress, was first appeared in The MacGuffin Vol. 36, No. 1 Winter 2020.

The Big Snow

The scarf wrapped around my mouth and nose grows moist with my breath, the breath of exertion. Walking through snow is difficult work. Spinning flakes keep me from placing my feet precisely. Afraid I will fall into a gopher hole, I move slowly, picking my way across the lawns behind houses, trying to reach my own.

Winter prairie blue with ice, few trees to block the wind. Snow swirls like mist obscuring my vision. In the farm field behind our yard, bare stalks left from autumn harvest poke out of the snow. In the bitter chill, my forehead aches, the only part of my face uncovered except for my eyes.

Our teachers have let us out of school early, out into the snow that clogs the sky. Mrs. Peters said, “Run home as quick as you can,” and we all scattered like chickens.

I have never been in a blizzard before, and at first it seems no different from any other snowy day, but Mrs. Peters told me this is special so I believed her. I am not sure where my brother went. I should have waited for him, but I listened to my teacher and forgot. 

I should have waited. I am the oldest; it is my job to take care of him. After all I am in fifth grade, he only in third. Even as I worry, the snow settles thicker, faster. It’s become more difficult to walk and soon I trudge in snow up to my knees, my breath labored. I can no longer see the stubble in the farmer’s field or even the bare rose bushes that border his farmhouse. The farmhouse seems to have vanished as well. Because it is painted white, I can’t distinguish snowflakes from solid walls.

I want to get home to tell my mother about Paul, so she can go find him. Fear squeezes my chest. What if the snow has buried him? I remember reading the book about Laura Ingalls’ long winter and how it snowed so much that cows almost suffocated to death in the snow except that her Pa thawed the ice over their nostrils so they could breathe. What if my brother has ice over his nose? What if he’s now covered in snow, and my mother won’t be able to save him?

When I make it to our back door, I prepare myself. My mother will know all of it is my entire fault - the cows and my brother and the ice and the snow. I don’t know how she will ever forgive me. 

I tug the door open, calling, “Mom, Mom—Paul, Paul.” 

I want to lay my burden onto her broad farmwoman shoulders. Such a weight, too heavy for my small arms to carry. The ice on my eyelashes melts until I can’t tell water from tears.

No one had been prepared. Not the weather forecasters, not the teachers who turned us out to find our way home, not our parents. After I burst into the house alone, my mother forced her way across the street to the Galiga’s house to see if my brother had made it there with his friend, Phil. Usually the two boys cut across the farm field on their way to and from school. The farm field now completely covered. Together both mothers pushed through the snow piling high over the farm stubble behind our house. There they found the two small boys struggling in snow up to their waists. I stood at the kitchen window, gasping as four figures appeared suddenly, their heads hunched against the wind. 

I remember my mother, not even bothering to take off her dripping coat, unwinding my brother’s scarf from his chapped face. 

“Whatever were you thinking, Paul?” she asked even as she hugged him.  

I wrapped myself in relief that my brother had been found, that I was no longer to blame. 

In the morning after the big snow, we woke to find the sun shining, the air still. I caught my breath at the glittering world of white. Nothing but snow and the roofs of houses peeking out. Everything covered: the neighborhood cars, bushes, swing sets, lampposts up to their waists. A pristine, ominous landscape. So quiet.

            The blizzard’s wild winds had whipped drifts up and over our roof, dimming the light from the windows on that side of the house. Later we climbed the drift to look out over the blinding world, making a game of sliding back to the ground. But at first, we were trapped. My mother had to push and shove against the door, attacking the packed crust with her broom before she could free us. 

That morning, my brother sat safe against the storm, but not my father. As we bent over our bowls of oatmeal, his empty chair loomed at the end of the table. The question I feared asking my mother: When will Dad come?

For the first time since we’d moved to Illinois, my father hadn’t come home to us. When we lived in Denver, he had worked as a long-haul trucker and spent many nights on the road.  I had accepted that as normal. I knew how to find the route he traveled on a map and the time he would return home. My mother explained he left to pay the rent and buy food. And he always returned with small presents from those trips. I remember the wooden salt and peppershakers he brought back from some town where he’d been. They sat in the middle of our kitchen table for years after we moved. 

My father might not talk or play with us much but in Illinois his truck roared up the driveway every night like clockwork, his steady presence a comfort. His absence forced by the storm made our situation seem even more ominous. Now that childhood dread comes back to me, heavy and damp.  

I can’t remember if Dad had been able to telephone my mother to let her know he made it to safety. I find it hard to believe the telephone wires hadn’t been torn down, sagging under the weight of ice, but perhaps his call got through. My mother rarely kept her worries from me her oldest daughter. Or perhaps that memory has fled because it terrified me so. Later the story of how he managed to make his way to Aunt Marion’s house, remaining stuck there for a week would become a family legend. But on that morning in our small kitchen with windows frosted over, my father’ absence clung to me like a ghost. 

Much later I would realize he had joined the thousands of other Chicagoans who abandoned their vehicles in the middle of roads and expressways, fighting through the blizzard to shelter. I’ve seen photos of cars and city buses scattered around the streets like toys, their drivers helpless to move another inch.  

 It was January 27, 1967, the day before my baby sister’s second birthday. Reading about the storm later, I learned the weather had been so unseasonably warm in the days before the blizzard that meteorologists forecast only four inches of snow. But by the time the system passed over us, the storm had dropped twenty-seven inches in one day, still one of the biggest Illinois blizzards on record. 

As usual, my mother got down to business with her jaw set. Bundled against the cold, she met with our neighbors in the middle of our street to decide what to do, who would go buy food. Our suburban neighborhood sat surrounded by wide-open prairie with the closest grocery store a mile away. The youngest couple, the Goodsons volunteered to trudge that mile dragging their son’s sled behind them. My brother and I climbed our drift, now hardened to crust, with their children. We all sat on our roof, watching their parents shrink into small black dots. I was the only one old enough to feel the pinch of worry.

It took them hours to return, but the milk and bread they brought back from the store kept us going until snowplows could shove their way down our street. After a few days, the snow and my father’s absence began to seem normal. My brother and I returned to our sibling squabbles. We grew tired of the snowdrifts and returned to our books and games. It was so easy for we children to accept the new world before us. 

I’m sure my mother went about her daily tasks, cooking and giving my small sisters their baths, putting us to bed each night. Even so, each night as dusk fell she must have missed her husband, must have felt marooned with four small children. I’m sure she prayed, her answer to any crisis. Perhaps I joined her. Back then, long before I learned brothers aren’t always found and fathers don’t always return home, I still believed in prayer. 

My essay, “At the Mortuary” was a finalist in the Willamette Writers 2019 Kay Snow Award. I’m still looking for a journal to “home” this essay. I’ll keep you posted!

You can read my essay “Snowsuit Prisoners” first published in Longridge Review Fall 2018