A Day with Grandpa

As a child it was always a special treat when our grandparents on Daddy's side came to visit. They lived over five hundred miles and we didn't get to see them often.

One evening when I was nine years old we came home from school to find that Grandpa and Grandma had come to visit. Grandpa always felt a little intimidating to me. He was so big, in every sense. His voice, his hands, and he apparently loved eating. He had huge bushy white eyebrows and a long white beard and was totally bald. He wore round eyes glasses that looked as if someone had happened to sit on them and then he tried to straighten them out by himself. When ever he bunched his eyebrows together and looked sternly at me I always felt like hiding somewhere and took special care to try to be extra good when ever he was around.

He wasn't all scary though and loved to have us gather around him and tell us stories from the Bible. Stories we had never heard before and we were always in awe as he told them. He had a way of changing his voice for every character and he held us spellbound for hours as he told story after story.

Grandma was short and one of the happiest people I know and she had this delightful way of being able to connect with whom ever she was talking with no matter what their age. She always made me feel important and grown up.

In Somerset County the Amish school allows children to have three days off for something other than sickness or doctor visits. We hardly ever used those days but Daddy decided that this visit was important enough that we could have one day to stay at home and be able to spend more time with our grandparents.

It was the perfect day as Grandpa told us story after story before going with Daddy to visit some people.  Grandma helped Mom around the house and baked a batch of her favorite cookies and taught me how to bake a simple milk pie that Daddy used to love when he was a little boy.

They left the next morning before we got up. School seemed dull and boring after such an interesting day.

I have often been glad that Daddy decided to allow us to stay at home that day because that was the last time we saw Grandpa. He passed away a few months later but I will always have those happy memories to cherish.