#family conflict

Noah Harrison

Dad and I had a real disagreement in 2013 about whether I'd eventually take over the store, and I left home that year to try things on my own -- finished my diploma through night classes and started picking up construction labor jobs around the county not long after. Turned out I had a knack for it, and within a couple years I was learning framing and finish carpentry from a crew foreman who took me under his wing. This photo's from 2014, a few weeks after a flood wrecked the store's inventory -- Mom called and asked me to come help with the cleanup, and I did. Dad and I were still a little stiff with each other that week, but working side by side on something that mattered to both of us was the start of things easing up between us.

Arthur Harrison

Everything changed in 1982, when the plant cut half its machinists loose with no severance and no warning. Dad was one of them. He was forty-four with two kids and a mortgage, and he spent the next several years doing whatever paid: hauling scrap, fixing tractors for old farmers, digging drainage ditches. Money fights became a regular thing between him and Mom -- nothing violent, just the low, grinding kind that comes from never having enough. I was twenty and dropped out of a welding program to run the family hardware store and keep the bank from taking the house, and my older sister, who'd had enough of the tension at home, packed a bag the day she turned eighteen and drove west without telling anyone where she was going. We didn't hear from her again for over a decade. This photo from 1983 is the last whole family picture we have -- you can tell nobody in it wanted to be there that day.