Our theme for the month of June is “older and wiser.” Writers were asked to write a response to one of their previous pieces. Today, Natasha responds to her March 2024 post, “Tread Less Lightly.”
Three months ago, I wrote about my grandfather’s last birthday—his eighty-eighth. On June 17, he passed peacefully from this world. I’ve been blessed to know all my grandparents for three decades and have many memories to treasure. Of course, that also means the final goodbye is more difficult—but endlessly worth it to have known Grandpa from the Farm. We always called him that—even though his and Grandma’s home through most of my life was no longer the farmstead—because he was a farmer, through and through. He was also a carpenter and a craftsman and a true jack of all trades. He loved cards and fishing and working with his hands.
I remember many a lively game of Wizard, with Grandpa’s well-worn quip when bidding, as he extended his index and the remaining three-quarters of his middle finger, “that’s two—not one and a half!” He’d grin around the table, trademark sparkle in eye. In all his decades of carpentry, the loss of two partial digits and asbestos lung were the only lasting injuries. He was a lifelong and master craftsman, building everything from the sanity-saving rocking chair I spent endless colicky hours in as an infant to the hope chest he built for me only a few years ago. He built grandfather clocks and wishing wells, chairs and tables, shelves and frames. He built homes and barns. His hand was in the treehouse deck and the garden’s rain barrels that loom large in the landscape of my childhood.
He understood the workings of things. He engineered ingenious drainage and husbandry solutions for a smooth-running family farm. He built pig pens to slope for tidy (insofar as that can be applied to dung) manure removal, and the liquid manure spreader to turn waste into fertilizer. He could fix all manner of things, and nothing even remotely usable went to waste. He grew up and raised his own family living judiciously off the land, everyone pitching in to grow most of their sustenance. When I think of trips to visit Grandma and Grandpa from the farm I think of homemade raspberry jam, the basement cold room filled to the gills with canned fruits and veggies, beds covered with heaps of cozy quilts he and Grandma made together, walls adorned with the decorative rugs he crafted.
He followed Christ—and not just into the carpentry profession; he loved God steadfastly. His measured voice, reading the Today Daily Devotional and scripture passage and offering up a prayer, preceded countless family suppers. In his final year, he celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday, sixty-second wedding anniversary, and—the day before his passing—his sixty-first Father’s Day. He was father to six, grandfather to fourteen, great-grandfather to two. He touched many lives through his, and I am blessed to have known him. Until we meet again, I love you much, Grandpa from the Farm.
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
