Grandparents' Day at School

(While all my students wrote letters to their grandparents,

I decided to write an essay about my own.)

I'll tell you about my Grandparents,
those who poured their lives into my parents
and into me
and into my children.

I see them resting side by side,
under emerald mounds of wild marigolds.
young again,
Serene, at peace with God.
Sheltered from the frenzy of this world
and from its pain, of which they had their share...

For this one brought home a bronze star and a purple heart from the Great War.
Trembling in the trenches with other frightened boys,
scarcely old enough to hold a gun, he breathed the caustic, mustard gas that withered his lungs, while his eyes saw sights that seared and scarred the senses. It aged him and he lived old for the rest of his life, still a fighter; but, knowing that this war hadn't really ended all wars, he preached a different campaign, one to change the human heart, for the war that smolders there breeds all the others.

And this one held her baby son and watched him breathe his last. Just a fever, just a flu, and the fragile little love was gone. For all her days she remembered him, his shining sapphire eyes--such a bright boy, with that perfect dimple in his chin, like his daddy's. For solace, she carried Psalms within her heart and taught them to her two little daughters. She quoted them still at ninety, when her eyes failed her, for faith and words never did.




























That one lived through howling winds out in the prairie dust bowl, tossed by a tornado,
slammed by the shed, his leg bone driven into the hip socket and fused there for seven months. "You'll walk with crutches all your life," the doctor predicted. But it didn't happen. After a short, brush arbor, revival prayer, he ran, and left his crutches in the dirt. He raised his seven children on the dry Panhandle sod, and they rose early to milk the cows, and they climbed whirling windmills under a topaz sunrise. When Grandpa was old, he groaned softly with each step, uh-uh-uh, yet though his bones were hurting, he always managed a thank you, smiling up at strangers, for in the end we were all strangers to him.


And my grandma over there, well,
not one of her two dozen grandkids could beat her at a game of checkers. She was the queen.
I remember her hair, bound tightly to her head with silver clips, and her voice--singing softly, while she rocked one grandchild or another on her ample lap:

"Little children, little children

who love their Redeemer are the jewels,
precious jewels, His loved and His own.
They shall shine on that morning,
His bright crown adorning..."

So there they sleep--my grandparents--gems under grass green velvet, alive and crowned with forever, released from the yoke of time.