Our year has been bookended with trips to Rupert, Idaho. A quick Google search will tell you there's just over 6,000 people that live there and it's remained near that number since before the 1990's. We used to be the ones included in that number. Before that, my grandparents were a staple to that community for well over 50, maybe even 60, years!
I've not lived there since I was eleven, over 20 years ago. Yet, I can still tell you how to get to the grocery store, the post office, the library, the eye doctor, the gas station. I can tell you how to drive to my grandparents' old house. I could walk backwards to it. Heck, I could even get there with my eyes closed.
They used to live just down the road from the Lutheran Church they'd been a part of their entire time in Rupert. In two days, we will find ourselves once again sitting in those wooden pews that make your back ache, listening to music on the organ with light streaming in (if it's sunny) through stained glass windows of differing snapshots of Jesus' life on earth.
We'll cram into a room adjacent to the sanctuary with stuffy air as motionless as my grandfather's lungs and we'll sit with a third death—beginning, middle, and end is this year's story; especially for my mother who has lost her entire immediate family. Then, just as it began, we'll end this year by making our way to the front of that sanctuary as the organ plays an old hymn and return to the wooden pews.
And I'll have to wonder how their legacy will carry on through my mama, her children, and our children. We don't share DNA with my grandparents. But that's never made any difference. I know, though, when I look at my boys I do not see any physical resemblance of my grandparents in their sweet faces and features. My two young sons share no little ear shape, voice tones, facial structure, or any myriad of other characteristics that get passed from one generation to another with my grandfather. And I wish they did.
I wish they did because under his "harsh" German exoskeleton was an even harder working man. He earned everything he had. He provided his family with, likely, tenfold what he had been given to start with in life. He was honest. He never gave up an opportunity to joke and have fun. He enjoyed life.
*
I walked into my parents' home and sat down the pies. Brandon and I got the boys settled and said our "hello" to everyone. It was Thanksgiving. At some point I wandered into the living room where my grandpa was watching the Lions play the Packers on TV.
"Who are you rooting for, Grandpa?"
He just smiled.
So I asked again, "Who are you rooting for?"
At some point his smile turned sly and I asked if it was the Packers.
He responded, "Yes, but I didn't want to say anything!"
Just then, we'd made a secret pact to not mention this to my sister and her family, avid Lions fanatics, I mean, fans.
At some point during all the gobbling I sat on the couch and itched my nose the way I always do. Three times with the back of my hand. He said my name and mimicked the habit. We chuckled. I never could break that habit. Even when I lived with them and he determined to end it.
*
These were my last memories with him. And I'm grateful. His year was traumatic. At age 92 he lost his wife and son. Yet, there he sat and joked with me.
When I look in my boys' eyes, though they may not be the same shade as my grandfather's, I consider that their very lives would not exist without him. That, though they do not share DNA, they share something far greater that is still passed down from one generation to another. Our traits may not be physical but are more valuable—kindness, generosity, hard-work, stubbornness, honesty, family, tenacity, love, laughter and humor.
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