The clock was pushed back an hour and my father was happy because he had an extra hour to spend his day with. On his off-days, my father likes to solve puzzles, browse the web for Persian news, walk around the house, eat ice cream and drink tea. Today, he collected dead leaves that covered our lawn. I helped him put them away in large, plastic bags, and we did this over and over, until I got tired and left. The leaves made me sad because they were pretty, red, green and yellow, but now rotten, waste. And I was sad to see my father there, bending down, and rising back up, his gloved hands full of dead leaves. I wondered if the house still felt foreign to him, if the arduous housework bothered him, if he minded clearing the grass of dirty leaves. I should ask him, why have I not asked him this?
We will get used to it. We’ll get used to turning off the lights, and locking the many doors, and maybe we’ll even sit in the living room one day instead of the kitchen, where we sit and eat and talk and do homework and check our emails.
My father came back inside, and it felt like it’d been hours. He was tired, but still holding a weary smile. He wasn’t even wearing a jacket, not even a sweater on a windy November afternoon. We poured him tea, and that’s how we spent the rest of the day, drinking tea, and answering the phone, and reading the paper. My mother did the laundry and sewed the curtains in my sister’s room and I bought the groceries and washed dishes. And Sunday was over, and it didn’t matter that the hour was pushed back because we still stayed up late, getting ready for tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that.