Story Anonymously Shared by one of our Kindness Ambassadors

Most mornings I spent with my Grandpa Don, I found him at the old, scarred-up dining room table with a small white cup of coffee in front of him. 

For many of those early years, a beige, unfiltered Camel burned in his fingers as slowly twisting smoke wafted out the cracked-open window. If it was too early, I could see his reverie needed to be unbroken. I never interrupted his sunrise meditation as he looked out his big bay window. 

As a boy, I found his gaze frighteningly intense, and I imagined him fighting his old battles in WWII, or was remembering lost friends. As a WWII veteran he had had many near death moments and his story, if you could coax it out of him, was a tale of redemption, pure love and waiting light, but only when your time is right and your work is done. 

 I too would turn around and look out the window, seeing the occasional deer and turkey parading by, slowly starting their day, listening to the silence of my grandparents' old house around me, a faint rooster echoing down the valley and my quiet grandfather in deep thought behind me. The ticking of the tall clock and the low bells every fifteen minutes, with the deep repeating gongs telling us the top of the hour. That clock seems like part of my pulse still. What was he looking at? What was he remembering? What has he resolved? We’d wait until the sunlight just peeped out behind the house, lighting up the treetops across the creek at the top of the hill where the driveway ended, until gramps would slam the dregs of his gritty coffee, stamp out his butt and say 'C'mon Douglas, let's go take care of the  horses.'

In my young days as the older son of a single mom, dropped off at Gram and Gramps' place for days at a time, I learned a lot of independence. Those acres in Shingle Springs helped form me in ways I am still understanding today. It seems to me that the most important lesson I learned while growing up in the country was to respect the unseen currents that move men and animals to do what they do. Getting along with horses, dogs, family members and other members of the species you cohabit with means you work with the flow, not against it. You learn about flow from slowing down and appreciating what is around you as special and worth observing. Grandpa wouldn’t call it flow, he’d say “That’s just life, Douglas,” but that’s what he taught me every time we walked outside. 

On our morning walks down to the tack room for big green dusty flakes of alfalfa or a can-scoop of sweet-smelling grain, Gramps didn't say much. I don't remember if I talked much. But every time he pointed at something like a clump of ladybugs on a hollow fence post, or a rattler coiled up and buzzing his tail at us, or those duck eggs that we'd find sunken in the creek, there was subtext about natural systems. He knew more from observation than book learning and his deep feelings that the natural world offered redemption from the insanity of the mechanized world were obvious. We spent many, many glowing hours watching critters live, or sharing slices of a turnip from his garden, or wondering if the creek was going to fill enough for fish again this year. 

Of all the creatures big and small that we loved to watch and talk about ("Gramps have you ever seen a Hummingbird egg? Gramps, why doesn't ice sink?"), our favorite was always the honey bee. Every time we ever saw a bee in a flower, whether in his vegetable garden or later in his life when he mostly nurtured flowers and old tailless cats, we would watch it collect nectar on purpose and pollen accidentally, and we wondered where they were headed next.

We schemed and planned and emailed about the kinds of bees best suited for his property. We would talk about homemade bee suits and what crops we could easily plant on his pastures to tempt our fleet of queens. After I accepted an out of state job, we had to admit to each other that we would never share bee colonies. But he encouraged me to follow through with our dream and I set up two colonies during that first summer in Washington. He loved the pictures of his great-grand daughters getting sick from eating too much honey during the harvest and he cracked up over the picture of my swollen face after getting stung in the forehead. 

We had lots of laughs and stories even though we were a thousand miles apart. Grandpa Don remains one of my personal heroes and I keep bees in his memory, an opportunity to share the love of nature with my girls, like he did with me.