Lillian Dailey

I gave my dad a sticker of the Winnie the Pooh character Tigger one Saturday morning when I was four, interrupting his pancake cooking because it felt essential to share. He stuck it on the vent hood, front and center, fresh from the sticker sheet. A layer of grime and years of cooking oils surrounding the sticker, giving it an ethereal glow. Years of spatter from Sunday morning bacon and boiling pasta water have immortalized him beneath a varnish of sorts.

The long existence of the Tigger sticker as a pillar of our kitchen shows the love and care that my dad puts into everything. He could have taken the sticker and thrown it away, or scraped it off after a day or two, but he has left it there for sixteen years. When cleaning the vent hood, he deliberately works around Tigger to avoid damaging him in any way. These actions mirror the care and patience that he has shown to me and my sister throughout our entire lives, from helping us make our beds, helping us through hard schoolwork, and teaching us so much of what we know.

Tigger has had a front row seat to my sister’s and my childhoods, watching us turn from kids playing with dried pasta and rice on the floor into fully fledged adults, cooking dinner for the family. Tigger, with his bouncy tail and raised arms, has cheered us un from kindergarten through senior year as we ate breakfast, cried over math homework with our dad, and returned from late night swim meets in high school.

Having now left for college, I find solace in the knowledge that Tigger will be waiting for me, stuck to the vent hood, every time I come back home.