it is about my relationship with my grandpa.
Enjoy:)
His pale gray blue eyes resembled a flock of fluttering morning doves. His smile wasn’t so worn out then. His big, rough, soil stained hands held a baby girl with golden blond curls as he bounced her on his knee. She somehow molded those wrinkles he wore swept beneath his eyes from laughing too much and together they shared a hunger for life.
One afternoon she stormed in from the scorching sun. Her deep blue eyes were vibrant from her tears and her face was crimson and and loaded with impatient temper. ‘Grandpa!’ the three year old cried,’They won’t let me play with them!’ Her brow was furled and her smile was bent upside-down. Her sister, Elizabeth was eight years old and she did not want her baby sister tagging along with her and her friends. The thought of being left out suddenly struck the toddler as her eyes welled up with tears and they soon started flowing.
Grandpa gathered his salty, earth baked munchkin in his arms and dried her tears with the bottom of his red checkered shirt. He held her until her whimpering hushed to a soft sniffle. Her hair was up in a tight ponytail and her miniature jeans had a rip across the knee. She was curled up and safe in his burly arms. He cautiously unfurled her body and set her back onto her faded and mud cracked sneakers. She then returned to her vertical state of unease.
Grandpa had a solution to everything, even the quarrels of his saccharine flavored granddaughters. With a gleam in his eye and sympathy in mind he told the appalled toddler, ‘You tell them that you are Grandpa’s little blond angel and I said they have to play with you.’
A smile crept across her face when she turned toward the big maple door. As she skipped over the threshold and onto the back lawn he heard her quip back at her sister ‘Grandpa said that I’m his little blond angel girl and you have to play with me!’
She knew then that she had made an ally and that she could use her ancient friend as a crutch when she felt beaten down or left out. Grandpa would always be there to stand up for her because she was the younger and favorite grandchild.
Her mother was strong and independent. As a single mother she was hellbent to make the best life for her children that she could. She wanted her children to have everything that she never did. So, she worked at a local gas station and it was there that she met the flavor of the week. It was also there that she met her main squeeze, her future husband and father to her children. The big man took her for who she was. Not only did he love her but he loved her children as his own. The couple soon took the plunge as husband and wife. Later they would migrate north to utah and have two sons together only forty-five minutes from grandma and grandpa.
There were so many memories shaped in their grandparents antique home. They radiate from the concave corners of the tall ceiling and echo through the squeaky old floorboards whereas some are embedded into the horribly matched multicolored carpet of their living room.There they sink waiting to be stomped or shaken loose into the air waiting for someone to breathe them in.
The children always spent some portion of the summer staying at their grandparents home. They loved getting dressed up for church and getting rewarded for being nothing but their own special selves. Grandma and Grandpa spoiled them with every last penny they had, even though they didn’t have much. The children played make believe in the old camper shell behind the house in an area that looked much like a junkyard. They watered Grandma’s rosebuds with care in the shade against the home and they would fill the hummingbird feeder with sugar water to watch the birds from the living room with Grandma.
My best memories are of the peak of summertime when Grandpa’s garden grew best. The tomatoes were ripe red for picking and Grandma mixed them into her made up soup named ‘cookaleiuka.’ The peppers were too spicy for my liking but Grandpa grew three long rows of them for his homemade salsa which the whole neighborhood raved about. Grandpa grew everything that could withstand the Moapa Valley heat. He always grew more than he and Grandma could possibly consume and he knew that. He intended on giving most of it away.
I loved his enormous garden. I loved everything about it but what I loved most was not the deep green of the crisp leaves or the bright red of the fresh ripe produce but the magnificent yellow of the gargantuan sunflowers. The goliath plants towered dominantly over the other ones. They did not snarl or bark at the fruitful eden but rather brought character and positivity. They looked up at the magestic desert sky as if attempting to reach the billowy heavens. I always took note of that.
I loved to walk beside grandpa as he dragged the mile long coil of bothersome green hose. I would turn the knob and it would sputter mud at first but then it would turn to clear and the thirsty roots would swallow the moisture through the sandy drought stricken soil. My younger brother and I would stand outside through the rays of the harsh sun and try to reach the dark speckled faces of the beastly sunflowers. We wanted those seeds more than anything in the garden. We stood on our tiptoes and we climbed each others shoulders to reach the seeds but we always saw defeat. Somehow only Grandpa knew how to harvest them. I later learned that once the flower died he would craftily cut off the head of it and shuck the seeds and make the once smiling flower faceless. He would then plant the seeds to produce more glorious flowers for the year to come.
Grandpa would wake up when the sun rose and he would water his little piece of heaven. During the day he would take us to the Sahara outdoors and we would bother Grandpa as we followed him and obnoxiously inquire as to which ones were ripe enough to pick. Grandma would always praise us when we brought in the plumpest or the ripest. I think we wanted his approval and praise more than anything. It made us so overjoyed. It always seemed as though we were more proud of Grandpa’s vegetables and fruits than he was.
When I was fourteen years old, Grandpa had unfortunately retired from gardening. He still loved it and he wanted to do it more than anything. We accepted it and we knew it was just time for his body to slow down from the years upon years of planting, watering, and harvesting. From then on we would arrive to fruitless troughs and crests of dark nutritious dirt. Grandma and Grandpa’s house was always different from then on. Somehow everything had changed without Grandpa’s beautiful garden.
I was almost seventeen years old when my grandpa had been diagnosed with cancer. He had experienced a constantly irritable cough for months before he mentioned it to his doctors. It originated as a skin cancer and had spread throughout his body to his lymph nodes before the we knew anything was wrong with him. Any treatment would surely be fatal at that point and decided they would send him home without a promise of life.
We learned that Grandpa’s body had served its purpose on earth. Over the span of one month he had gone from a state of disorientation and confusion to his death bed. He once bounced a baby girl with golden blonde curls on that brown striped couch in the living room. It was a snap into reality to see the couch replaced with the hospital bed that grandpa breathed his last breaths where I had breathed my first as an infant. We were sure to visit him every chance that we had. Forty five minutes of driving was a small price to pay for spending a few minutes with an old man that you once called your best friend and he was the best friend that I could ever ask for. He soon passed away in that bed beside the window overlooking Grandma’s fanciful roses. I will always remember the giant sunflowers that looked toward the sky like Grandpa and I will always remember reaching for them.
In loving memory of my grandpa, Robert William Dotson
May 3rd 1924-April 23rd 2007
