Lost Loves

It's been a year today since my family lost the great love of our lives.

  
We buried him on Valentine's Day.

I can still hear the flags singing their memorial song to him as they flap in the wind and Taps being played and and the soft earth opening up to receive our silent tears and his body laid to rest.

And time doesn't heal every wound.

When I close my eyes I can still hear him whistle on the way back from the barn and the sound of his boots walking up the stairs and the smell of the gravy he made for breakfast.

I cherish the memories of the last days when I got to hold his hand and feed him yogurt and look into his eyes long and deep.  And then I got up to leave and he asked me to stay longer.

I wish I had stayed longer. 

I remember the first fields being plowed after he was gone and thinking to myself  'How dare they go on without him!'

But that is what happens.

We go on without him.

Time marches on unfamiliar ground with no patriarch.  We fumble our way through planting and harvesting and lazy Sunday afternoons and UK basketball games trying to accept this new normal.


And if the pain from losing him indicates the legacy he left behind then his is the story for the ages.

And that is my plan.  To tell and retell his story for the generations to follow.  So they will know what I know.  That this 3rd grade educated, smoking since he was 5, most-comfortable-in-overalls man proved that there still can be Happily Ever Afters.
That the secrets to life are often found in tobacco patches and tractor cabs.  And that there is no place like home.

Thank you, Pawpaw Peanut, for the legacy you left behind.  I can't wait to see you again.