Snow falling outside.
Coffee brewing inside.
A hundred little noises that happen around people working, and maybe someone chuckling at a joke.
It all mixes together and just like that, I miss my granddad.
You would have loved to see Kaylee, Grandpa. She’s a storyteller, just like you.
I never met either of my grandfathers, sadly. Both died not long before I was born.
– c.
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From what I gather, most of my friends’ dads are/were about the same age as my granddad. He was… let’s see… 44 when I was born? 45? Somewhere in there.
He and my dad owned nigh-adjoining acreage until after I graduated high school; were lived all of four miles away from them, with maybe one house in the intervening space. I saw him pretty much every day during the summer and breaks, whenever I was working on the farm. (Which I was, most days I wasn’t in school.
He taught me to shoot (he was a certified gun safety instructor for something like 30 years), and hunt, and how live traps worked, and how to tell a story out loud.
Holy christ he could spin a yarn.
http://media.sd.gov:81/sdpb/dakotastories/homefront/TestermanMiller.wma
I’d forgotten — about halfway through that recording — he talks about going fishing in Germany…
… with grenades.