“You see that girl,
We raised her here.
She was a good girl.”
And while he no longer knows my name, my husband, or my child,
It is enough now that some part of him remembers some part of me.
And while he is thinner than the rough-neck farmer I once knew,
It is enough now that he grips my hand tight and hugs me hard to his chest.
And while the doors in his mind make strange connections between disparate pasts,
It is enough now that he still offers me a room to stay, if I should ever need one.
And while he drifts and is sometimes absent from the world in front of him,
It is enough now that when I call him Granddad he leans in and kisses my cheek.
And while it feels like a part of my own childhood will be lost with his loss,
It is enough now that I remember…
The rattle of the old Ford pickup truck on a sodden and bumpy pasture,
The wagon wheel of a steering wheel in my little hands when he let me “drive,”
The toasty smell of hay and the echoing sound of the baler, and his cattle call,
The smoke rising from his pipe and how he simply gave it up because I asked,
The motherless calf we found just born and how we bottle fed and raised her,
The Collie, Barney, and how he gave chase around the truck and under the fence,
The cowboy boots, and shoehorns, and handkerchiefs, and tractor grease,
The slices of salted watermelon over the sink and the ever-present peanut m&m’s,
The way we begged him to “scare us!” when we went to bed each night, and how he would always say no, and how sometimes he would crawl back into our room and scare the daylights out of us, and how we laughed hard and loved him for it.
“You see that man,
He raised me there.
He is a good man.”
-A.R.
Farmer with a Pitchfork, by Winslow Homer
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