Joy is my maternal grandfather’s name. He came from Northeastern
Iowa, born into a farming family in the late 19th century. He became
the County Clerk and walked to work and church down the block from their
bungalow type clapboard house with a swing on the front porch.
I only saw him three times. The first was when they visited
our home in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin in the 1950s. This bedroom community off
of Lake Michigan had side-by-side single-family homes with small yards. Ours
had a single apple tree in the back. My grandfather took me there when I was
perhaps seven to show me how to peel and core an apple. The photo with this
essay is of his father in his own apple orchard in England many decades earlier.
Our own small apple orchard now reminds me of this simple and fruit-filled
time. He also taught me to play cribbage, a card game I hope to teach my own
grandchildren when I see them soon in their Oregon home surrounded by the vast
orchards of Harry and David.
The next visit was to their Iowa home in Estherville. That
time, my grandmother Elsie, baked donuts and cookies with the black walnuts
from the family farm they showed us. On this same farm we hunted pheasants that
day. I must have been about 12, but I still vividly recall sitting on a red anthill
that taught me another kind of lesson. I would not return to Iowa until
graduate school for healthcare administration many years later.
Our final visit was for their 50th wedding
anniversary when Joy and Elsie came to see us again in our new home on Lake
Michigan. I recall their love of the flower gardens my own mother cherished to
cultivate. The summer sun brought a bright memory to the cutting of their cake
in the porch beside our sizable apple orchard. Joy found great memories in
picking apples with me for the last time. By then his whispy red hair barely
covered his balding head. It is from my maternal grandfather that I have
received the same hairline.
It seems that it is the simple and common moments that I
remember most. They bring a warm joy to me now as I write of these short-lived
times. As I close this story I also recall
with fond memory when I visited my own mother for the last time in her closed
memory unit for dementia. For some reason known to God, I had carried my Iowa
grandmother’s Bible with me. As I opened the Words and shared them with my own
testimony of salvation, God opened her now Alzheimer’s closed mind and mouth as
she spoke for the first time in two years. My mother asked to find this same
joy in redemptive faith that I had. And so I read the words of the “Roman Road”
to salvation with her and she repeated them as she received Jesus into her
heart as Savior. These were to be the last words I would hear from her, as she
died two days later with a peaceful smile on her face the nurses tell me. So I
can say like the Apostle Paul of these times.
“I thank my God every time I
remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in
the gospel from the first day until now” (Philippians 1:3-5).
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts.