A Place in the Order of Things

My grandfather died two weeks ago, a few months short of his 89th birthday, in the same room where he was born. Most every night of his long life, he slept under the same roof, in the farmhouse where his parents had settled just after their marriage.

Historically speaking, this kind of stability is unremarkable. But in modern America, where the average person moves 11.4 times in a lifetime, it would be difficult to compute just how rare it is. My eldest son, who just turned eight, has already lived in four different homes, in three different states.

My grandfather also died a farmer, as had his father before him, and his grandfather before him, back as far as the records go. We tucked wheat stalks and an ear of field corn into the floral spray on his coffin. The photos lined up at the back of the funeral home showed him on his tractor and standing in the barnyard with the Angus steers. There was a sign from Esskay, which bought his beef for decades, and an aerial photo of the farm.

He’d only foresworn the tractor two years ago, when a fall from the step landed him in the hospital for a few weeks. He continued to supervise the work done by others and to check the grain prices regularly. I saw him in the hospital a few days before his death, when the medicine was making his mind a bit foggier than usual. He looked out his window over a vast parking lot, but what he saw was a rolling field. “That one would be good for corn,” he told me.

From the Field into the Choir: Remembering Grandpap

“Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.”  Psalm 104:23

I have an image of my grandfather fixed in my mind.  If I also live to be 88, I expect it is how I will remember him.  He is headed out to a day’s work, dressed in a tattered red hooded sweatshirt and blue jeans streaked with brown, clothes that even after careful washing smell partly sweet like silage and partly pungent like something else.  He walks with a determined stride and a broad grin, and he’s whistling, “Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight and dance by the light of the moon.”

Why wouldn’t he be whistling and smiling?  He was going to work.  And Grandpap loved to work, found it deeply satisfying.  He pursued his work with the intensity that some men reserve for pleasures that are far less healthy and useful. 

He was able to work each day in a place that he had always known and loved.  My grandfather was born in the house where he would eventually die, even in the same room.  He learned about crops and cattle from his father, and spent decades tilling the fields he had wandered as a boy.  He loved these pastures and crop fields, because they contained the story of his life.