The sun has finally come out in a small town in rural Ontario during my mother’s childhood. When my mother sees it, she shoves her feet into her running shoes and runs outside.

The air is still cool in some spots after a rainy morning, but the sun is starting to warm things up. She walks to the front yard and sees that the road is still dark from the rain, but the sun is making it sparkle a little bit. She looks closer and sees that the black asphalt is really made out of a million tiny different colours.

Seeing the colours in the sun after the rain and seeing the sparkles gets my mother thinking: what does asphalt taste like?

Small pebbles imbed themselves into the palms of her hands as she leans down and sticks her tongue out.

Dirt. It just tastes like dirt.

“What are you doing?”

My mother scrambles to get off of the road. Her older brother is watching her.

“Nothing,” she says, trying to sound relaxed.

“Were you licking the asphalt?”

“No,” she says, her voice suspiciously high.

“Okay, good,” he says with exaggerated relief. “You could die from doing that.”

Her eyes are wide and grey. “I could die?” she says in awe.

“Well, yeah, it’s poison,” he says. “You would have to drink 80 gallons of water if you didn’t want to die, and even that might not work. It’s a good thing you weren’t licking the asphalt!” He laughs and walks away.

And that is the story of how my grandmother found my mother sitting on the kitchen floor on a sunny afternoon, sobbing as she drank glass after glass after glass of water.

Are you celebrating Father’s Day this weekend? Some people are. They’re going out to brunch, they’re having barbecues, maybe they’re going to the beach. I’m going to celebrate by telling you about my dad’s rock.

He’s very proud of his treasure as it is a family heirloom. It’s the colour of gravel and made up of tiny, column-like threads. It looks like an Escher print is trying to escape from it. He keeps it in a ziplock bag, which he is not able to close because the rock is too big. The reason why he keeps it in the ziplock bag is because it is an asbestos rock.

The rock was hacked out of the earth with a machine that made a grinding and halting sound. My dad’s uncles worked in the asbestos mine, and it wasn’t the dark, buried place that you think of when you hear the word “mine”. The sun shone on the large trucks as they drove up and down roadways that cut through rough steps that led up to the sky. My dad’s rock came out of the mine one day and somehow ended up in my grandfather’s possession. It was at one time bigger than it is now, but it shrunk over the years as Grandpa would occasionally break a piece off to give to various friends and relatives. He eventually gave the whole thing to my dad.

When my uncle found out that my grandfather gave the rock to my dad, he was mad. He wanted the asbestos rock. It should have been given to him. He is the oldest, after all. My dad disagreed with him. He thought that the correct person received the rock from my grandfather. They fought over this cancer-causing substance as only siblings can.

My dad still has the rock. As long as he doesn’t break it, he’ll probably be safe.

My dad is animated as he tells this story to me and my husband, Phil, who removes asbestos from old buildings for a living. He wears a hazmat suit and keeps a close shave so that his mask seals itself to his face properly.