"From Hell To Breakfast" [Remembering My Father's Words]

The day did not have an auspicious beginning. 

From the upstairs bathroom window I watched rain sluicing down the green metal roof of the side porch below; the branches of the cedar trees on the side lawn flailed in the wind.

Another grey and soggy day. 

Toweling damp hair away from my face, I hauled on jeans and a shirt,  headed for the stairs, attended by the usual retinue of cats. 

The cats milled about as I turned on lights, prodded at nearly extinguished coals in the stove.

Opening the front door, ushering Charlie-cat in and the boy cats out, I noticed that one of the outdoor cats had barfed on the step--noticed, thankfully, before planting my foot in the

 congealing pile. 

With the mess disposed off, I headed for the cat kibble bin in the Amish washroom turned garage. 

Jim had left the overhead door open hoping to disperse some of the condensation that slicked the concrete floor.

"SOMETHING" had clearly trespassed in the garage during the night!

A trash bin was upended, tins strewn across the floor, likely the work of a possum.

I collected my work gloves and strode out to gather up the tins, finding that still more of them had been carried onto the gravel drive and abandoned there.

Picking up cans, with cold rain drizzling into the neck of my shirt, I suddenly thought how my late father, Larry, would have described the scene.

"That trash is strewed from hell to breakfast!"

Larry was not given to serious profanity. As I mused  over his usual lexicon, I realized that his favored epithets all contained the word Hell.

A deteriorating situation was predictably 'going to hell in a hand-basket!'

An object going too fast [as in a stranger's car on our usually quiet dirt road] was 'going hell-i ty toot' or 'hell-i-ty ding-dong!'

Larry did have a temper, and when thoroughly angered would blast out, 'Hell and damnation!'

Clattering tin cans into the now righted bin, I pondered, not for the first time, the source of my father's idioms.

The first language of my paternal grandparents was Canadian French. 

The first US born generation of families who had moved from Quebec to upstate New York, later congregating in Addison County, Vermont, French was the language they spoke with ease. 

My father dismissed French as words he didn't comprehend-- a language spoken when 'the old people' came for a visit. 

Larry's grandparents had at least a rudimentary grasp of English, clumsily phrased, accented, but serviceable. 

His parents made the decision to speak English in the home, thus sparing their children the handicap of starting school with a language barrier--a situation still common among the French Canadian families of the area when I was in school.

Although Larry's parents sometimes conversed with each other in their native tongue, Larry and his siblings had no grasp of French.

My father's phraseology seems to have been unique to him--at least I never heard others use his particular expressions. 

Growing up with a passion for descriptive words, an ear that picks up on an unfamiliar turn of phrase or a local idiom, I noted that my father sometimes arranged words a bit awkwardly in a sentence, described things in terminology peculiar to himself [a gathering of objects referred to as 'a couple, two or three.']  It was almost as though some faint cadence from the speech of his French Canadian ancestry found a home in his every day parlance, traces of which he was seemingly unaware.

It was my mother-the school-teacher who usually read aloud to us at bedtime, although occasionally if she was busy, Daddy stepped into the breach. 

He read well, but balked at unusual words. My sister and I found this entertaining and slyly coaxed Daddy to read our Sunday School lessons. 

Mother caught on to this when she heard us giggling as Larry struggled with 'King Nebuchadnezzar'--we were quietly but sternly informed the next day that we had been rude and it wasn't to happen again!

Gathering the last of the scattered tins,  thumping the bin back into the corner of the garage, I found that I was smiling--still annoyed with the creature who had made the mess, but warmed by memories of my father.

Undoubtedly I would need to be judicious in making Larry's pet phrases my own--but if one must clean up a rummaged trash bin first thing in the morning, there is an earthy pleasure in declaring that it was all strewn 'from hell to breakfast!'