Letters from Grandpa
My father was recently given a set of letters written by his father (now gone these fifty years and more) to a friend in the early 1940’s.
Tag: Grandpa
The Grandpa plant: remembering someone I loved
If you thought that story was odd, here’s another even less explicable. Confession: Once upon a time, I noticed a beautiful plant in a loosely monitored location. It may or may not have been the windowsill of my grandpa’s nursing home. Okay, it was. I made sure the plant was hearty enough to withstand a little […]
Remembering Grandpa
When I was a child, I had more grandmothers than I could count—grandmothers and step-grandmothers and great-grandmothers, all beloved— but only one Grandpa. Grandpa was from Minnesota—a tough cookie, hardly sick a day in his life. He loved snow and popcorn and apple cider and northern lakes. He could tell stories that left us in […]
After the funeral
Confession: The only thing worse than seeing someone for the last time is not seeing someone for the last time. It wasn’t my grandpa after all. Someone had taken him away and left a wax effigy; not a very good one, though they obviously tried. The cheeks and mouth were all wrong. And the hands […]
The best part about Grandpa
Hard workin hands. Logger man hands. I remember how they felt around mine when I was seven, tagging along on his errands. I remember how they looked holding the whoopie pies I baked him, their smooth circles dwarfed by his huge fingers. All of his sons were big sturdy men with hands to match, but […]
Words from a friend
“In the beginning, O God, your Spirit swept over the chaotic deep like a wild wind and creation was born. In the turbulence of my own life and the unsettled waters of the world today let there be new birthings of your Spirit. In the currents of my own heart and the upheavals of the […]
Red
Confession: You already know this about me–sometimes I write about caterpillars when I can’t write about cataclysm. My grandfather is dying today (my only grandpa, pillar around which my earliest memories twine), and my sister is in the ER for the third time in a week (my only sister, oh my sister). I hold this […]