Sanctuary

My grandfather Oscar cussed us all from time to time, usually when we were out in the fields working with him. Mild stuff as profanity goes, especially by today's standards, but it was a novel experience to us, weirdly fascinating and threatening at once. It added a spicy flavor to the hard rations of summertime farm work.

At mealtime, the big dinners, he would bow his head and pray. This did not happen at every meal; only the more formal dinners as I recall. His prayers were not out of a prayerbook, but simple, heartfelt, the great man's melodic voice nearly breaking to tears as he thanked God for what we had. These were powerful moments, and absolutely genuine, and I vividly recall their essence even now.

I saw no contradiction or fallacy as I beheld the two sides of the man, for I knew him. The Iowa soil on his boots and the coronary stain of sweat on the work hat, the encroaching blindness, the small luxuries he granted himself, the way he treated his animals and the way he tended his fields...I worked and walked beside the man who thus touched that small part of the world.

Now, suddenly, I am the grandfather. And the thing I find myself wanting to pass on to Chloe's generation, more than any material thing, is the awareness of these souls they can never know. As I never was able to know my great grandmother Clara, or great grandfather John, or my Uncle Carl...but I have their stories, their letters and books, and we have the soil they worked and the farm they built. And I find myself taking these little seeds of knowing and planting them in my imagination, trying to grow the person up out of that fertile soil; this is inevitable, I guess, and unfair, for what springs up cannot be accurate. But it is far, far removed from the desert of knowing nothing about one's past and the ascendants who built the world one inherits.