Nearly a month with no post!

December was a long month of preparation for Christmas: we snuck open our Advent calendars when nobody was looking (the kind with chocolate not chores!) and I worked busily on finishing my semester and a variety of hand-made Christmas presents for several people.

Unfortunately the month brought the passing of my grandfather. He suffered a stroke several days before Christmas and passed on the 27th. We buried him three days later with full military honors. As our family filed into the tent, wind whipping around us, the tent itself bending under the stress, my son said quietly: "Is this heaven? Do we get to see Grandpa now?"

Over the years, grandpa gave me many gifts. Rather than reflecting on the lovely things I got for Christmas (which I adore), I wanted to take a few minutes to write about what my grandfather gave me.

My grandfather gave me an image of himself and my grandmother in their youth. He gave me the knowledge that two people can commit to each other and work through any variety of significant issues if they are committed. He taught me that working his small farm was a life -- that a life wasn't made from an overabundance, but from enough. When I was a child I watched him sit in his recliner and read the Bible in German.

When I grew older, grandpa taught me to drive a four-wheeler. And a tractor. And to spend hours upon hours exploring the farm on my own. Grandpa taught me to fish. Once, while fishing, grandpa taught me that "chew" and "bubble gum" were not one and the same. He taught me to turn slowly with a fish on the line.

When I was about my daughter's age, six, maybe a bit older, grandpa allowed me to enter a pen and pet a newborn calf one spring. A few years ago, he told the story to me again - he spoke of his fear centered over the mother cow's reaction, my safety, and how he weighed the two against my begging to be allowed to pet the cow. As an adult - and a parent - I'm paralyzed by the fear. I have no doubt that I would deny my daughter that experience in a heartbeat, claiming her safety to be tantamount. But as the child who snuck into a pen and pet a cow still slick with amniotic fluid and the ick of birth, I'm eternally grateful for that moment. It was captured in a photograph that sits, curled, inside a frame on my bookshelves today.