My grandfather we called Papa and I loved him very much. He passed away in his early 50’s when his coal truck went over the side of a mountain because the road fell away. I was eleven years old. The funny thing is that his training told the drivers to ride the truck out. That their chances were better then jumping out. He panicked and jumped out, rolled and hit his head on a rock. They drove the truck out of the ravine. It never even turned over.
I am told that I am a lot like he was. I have wished through the years that he was beside me giving me his gardening and beekeeping wisdom.
Some of my happiest memories are of being on his three acres. He had five gardens of vegetables, about 15 apple trees, pear trees, three different colors of cherry trees, plum trees, lots of different nut trees, three colors of raspberry bushes, and three colors of grapes on a big wooden structure, and gooseberries. When the apples started growing and were big enough to eat, I would climb a tree with the salt shaker and eat green apples with salt. What a treat! The whole place was like a wonderland to me.
He started his own seeds in a coal heated workshop. That workshop was amazing, and still, if I can smell the right oily smell, it takes me right back to that place. There were, what seemed like, hundreds of cubby holes with all sorts of different shapes and objects. Jars with screws and metal coffee cans. It was a delight to look through.
He was always trying something different and one year, he planted peanuts…in Ohio. He preserved cabbages, by pulling them out of the ground with the whole root, turning them upside down and burying them in dirt. Mid-winter, with lots of snow on the ground, he would go push the snow off and pull that cabbage up, good as new.
He had ducks and chickens. He would kill a couple chickens on Saturday, hang them in the cherry tree and have for Sunday dinner with homemade noodles. My mother says there was no better meal on the planet then those Sunday dinners.
He was a beekeeper and would get calls to go get bees that were in walls, hanging on trees, etc. I got into beekeeping and asked my Nana about his old equipment. She had sold it just six months before I had asked. She had them for about 20 years after his death and decided to sell them. Sigh…
This has been a rough year for our family and I don’t know if I’m nostalgic or just thinking of simpler times, but Papa’s acres are a place that my mind likes to rest and stay awhile.