Tom

living out life
2007-10-16 04:53:00 (UTC)

Papa

Thinking about my grandfather brings back a lot of good
memories. He was the last of a long line of farmers that
used to live in our community. I spent many days as a
youth tossing watermelons, picking tomatoes or lugging
cantaloupes. I look back on those days and realize they
helped shape me into the man I have become.

One memory stands out with my grandfather. When I was
about twelve, he took me and my brothers to the woods to
get a load of lighter wood- old pine that would be cut up
and used for kindling. We came across this one stump that
was huge. It was too big to load into the truck, so my
brothers and I tried to break it apart with the axe. Every
time we tried, the axe would bounce back up. He let us
struggle with it for a while, then finally stepped in
with, "Let me show you boys how to do it".

I still remember that moment. He sauntered up the the old
stump and stood over it, one leg on each side. He had on a
Western shirt that I had seen him wear many times. It had
different colored stripes on it and small, white, Western
buttons up the front. Like a giant swinging a
sledgehammer, he brought the axe down. Splinters went
everywhere and the seemingly impenetrable log fell open
with one blow. In a matter of minutes, he had it busted
into smaller pieces that we could easily load onto the
truck.

He semed so alive that day. That's why it was so hard to
believe the news that cancer was spreading through his
body. When he died, 16 years after the log adventure, one
of the first things I remembered was that day out in the
woods. A few days after the funeral, my grandmother asked
me if there was anything I wanted to remind me of my
grandfather. After thinking a few minutes, I started to
say something, but held back. She asked me again and I
told her the story of the lighter stump.
I asked her, "Do you think Papa still had that old shirt?"
She answered, "I'm not really sure, but we can look."

We went to his dresser drawer and started looking through
clothes. There, in the bottom dawer, I found an old,
striped, Western shirt with small white buttons up the
front. It was worn thin, but it was the same shirt he had
been wearing 16 years earlier. I couldn't believe it. The
sight of it was enough to bring a lump to my throat.

I still have the shirt shirt tucked away in a safe place.
It's there as a reminder of a wonderful grandfather who
took me hunting, fishing and talked to me about farming.
And every time I look at it, I remember a day years ago
when a giant of a man swung an axe at an old pine log.
That's a memory that I will never forget.




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