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Subject: grandpa
Time: 10:40:00 AM EDT
Author: unboundpoet
Mood: Sad
Music: my daughter's fave movie, as she sleeps in the recliner
I have thought about starting a journal for some time now, and always put it off knowing my track record in journaling. Perhaps writing it here will give me the incentive to keep it up! I suppose we will see.
I woke up crying this morning, thinking about my grandfather. He passed away a coupla weeks ago at age 98. Can you imagine what he has seen? My son took it very hard. What a lucky boy to have been able to be close to his great-great grandad. All of my great grandparents are gone now. I guess the thing that is bothering me the most is that I haven't been sure the past couple of years if he knew who I was. I wondered if he remembered how we played when I was a little girl, how we gathered grapes together, and how he used to show me the honeycomb when he tended his bees. I was so frightened of papa in his bee keeper's get up! I think about the stories he told, like the job he had gathering rocks from the road during the Depression and how Granny made the children's clothes from tobacco sacks. I think about all the questions I wanted to ask him, and how in adulthood I didn't take the time.I think of how much he loved Granny and how he grieved over her until he died, and I think about the house he built brick by brick standing on the hill empty, surrounded by the grapevines he tended, the stuff of my misty childhood memory...Oh Papa! How will I ever, in the early Autumn, be able to look at the vines hanging heavy with fruit and not shed tears for you ! Will my daughter remember you? If I could, just one more time, look out through the window with little girl eyes to see you on the tractor plowing the red clay, and Granny sitting on her over-turned bucket picking ripe strawberries! Even in your age you were a sunrise.I will love you always.
Long, long be my heart with such memories fill'd!
Like the vase in which roses have once been distill'd:
You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will,
But the scent of roses will hang round it still. - Thomas Moore
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i know how you feel. i do. i lost my grandparents 17 years ago. My god, has it been that long? geez! anyway, i still think of them everyday. Not one day goes by that they aren't in my thoughts. some days i still cry and miss them something terrible. i often look at my children and wish my grandparents knew them. talk to your kids about him. tell stories, keep him alive in their minds. let them feel your love for him thru your memories. its one of the best gifts you can give them.
4/21/04 12:39 PM