The sound of the scraping shovel buzzed throughout the backyard.

Shovel after shovel of dirt.

My father was at it again. The same way he’d been at it for nearly a week. 

I buried my forehead into my palms.

“Will it ever end?” I asked my father’s caregiver, Madeline. 

“I’m sure it will soon. It might just be a side effect of the impact,” she replied, sipping her tea.

We were in the kitchen, far from where Dad was digging. 

The sun shot its blinding rays in through the window. I sighed as I peered out the window. 

I saw the grass and flowers I took so much time to care for being flung up from their spots. 

Dad was sweating and puffing. Dirt caked his once white clothing and rusted shovel.

“I wonder what he’s digging for. It pains me to see him ruin my landscape. All the grass, flowers…” I shook my head and looked at Madeline. “He never told you yet, right?”

“Nope,” she said. “I would tell you if he ever did.” 

“I know. It… I just don’t know. I don’t know.”

I sat down defeated on a chair. I looked at Madeline once more.

She was an experienced woman. She told me once that she preferred “experienced woman” instead of “old.” 

The tone and crinkles of experience certainly weren’t concealed. They appeared clearly on her friendly face.  Her appearance was as soothing as her manner of speech. Talking at the pace of a wise tortoise with the vocabulary of an English tutor, she captivated me with each word. I hardly moved an inch when she told me tales of her life and family. 

She set down her mug. “Oh,” she said, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder, “don’t worry. He must want it to be a secret. He’ll tell us eventually.”

I shrugged. “Hard to keep it a secret for so long while shoveling all this time. I know I couldn’t do that.”

“You didn’t get hit in the head like him, though.” 

She sat down beside me on another chair. She was facing me with one of her comforting smiles. 

“I’m sure he’ll be back to normal soon. This kind of thing usually follows head trauma.” 

She looked out the window behind us. I could tell from her face she was preparing to recount another story. 

“Did I ever tell you about one of my father’s friends?”

“I’m sure you’ve told me about everybody you ever saw before.”

She chuckled and looked down at the kitchen floor. “I’m sure that’s true. Does that mean you should know this story, then?”

“I know it’s a story about one of your father’s friends.”

“Go on.”

“I said I heard them all. I never said I remember all,” I laughed.

Her laughter followed mine. “Then it’s fine for me to tell the tale?”

I nodded. 

“It begins in the early 1970s. This friend of my father’s worked at various businesses. Not an efficient employee, you might say.  Nevertheless, he was one of the kindest men I knew. 

“He invented his own ritual. Every Saturday, he brought over these big bags of sweets for my brother and me. 

“Well, they were really quite tiny bags, but we still gobbled them up anyhow. It was unknown to us at that time why he brought us those sweets all those weekends. 

“He spent countless hours with us and our father, too… But we soon found out he had depression, which is a dreadful disease. 

“He told my father he knew long before anyone else did. It wasn’t called depression back then. 

“My father didn’t understand what he meant when his friend told him he felt deeply depressed. After all, he acted completely normal.” 

She abruptly stopped. 

“Then?” I asked.

She solemnly looked at me. Her tone of voice was faint. “Then he passed away.”

“How?”

“He lost to depression. I won’t say much more.” 

She looked away, out into the distance. When she looked back, her familiar comforting smile was on her face. 

“Do you know why I told you that story?”

“Not really.”

“Ah, at least take a guess.”