Grandfather Part II

While he was staying with us, we had gone downtown to see the sights. It was a blustery day, and as we were standing at the corner waiting for the light, right across the street a big gust of wind blew a beautiful young redheads skirt clear up around her ears. I saw Grandfather come to point like a hunting hound. His vision wasn’t too good, but he could still make out what had happened.

I turned to him and said “Grandfather, at your age!”

He turned to me and said “Son, if I quit looking, you better start digging the hole.”

While he was out here, he went to spend a couple of weeks with my Aunt Mary and Uncle Frank in Olympia. They went out to take care of some errands, and when they got back Grandfather was not to be found.

Eventually they heard noises coming from the basement. He was down in the basement, which was dirt, and he was digging a hole. They probably thought that he had gone over the edge, so they asked him what the heck he was doing.

He explained that he had noticed that there weren’t many rock outcrops or anything. It seemed like the topsoil just went on and on, so he went down into the basement to look at the soil in profile. That got his curiosity up, so he wanted to see how much deeper the soil went. He had gone down about an additional three feet, and no end . When they asked him what he thought, he just pointed at Mount Rainier and said something about “It came from over there.”

He came out of his funk and lived for seven or eight more years. I loved to sit with him and get him talking about what the world was like when he was young. He told me about the first time he saw an automobile, which was a Locomobile. He always remembered it because it had eight wheels. I thought he was pulling my leg, so The first chance I has, I looked it up at the library. Sure enough Locomobile produced a car with eight wheels.

Grandfathers great passion was his garden. He had several. There was the spring garden, the main garden, the berry garden, the orchard. We were pretty much self sufficient. We canned, and had a couple of freezers. Grandfather made the best pickled crabapples, and apple jelly, and beans, and peaches. We picked wild blackberries and huckleberries. We made homemade ice cream from wild strawberries. We fished and hunted, made our own butter.

Back to butter. We used to take a quart mayonnaise jar and fill it with cream, and sit there and shake it. By the time the evening was over, voila’ butter. Whenever I visited the farm, I always came away with eight or nine pounds of home made butter.

Grandfather had Macular degeneration, and his vision kept fading. There was less and less he could do. Finally in the Spring of 1971 it had faded to the point that he could not distinguish the new vegetable sprouts from the weeds. He decided he didn’t care to stick around any longer, so within a couple of months he was gone.

He had a long and productive life, was loved by his family, and pointed a couple of generations of kids in the right direction.

So on Saturday mornings when I put the butter on my toast or waffles, I always stop for a moment and think of my grandfather.

Here’s to you wherever you are.