Straying a BIT off topic, but it'll do my best to get back on.

My Grandpa George passed away last week. (It's Mama Laura)

I am so extremely sad to have had him go, but his 95 years of life were good and he was more than ready to go see his bride - grandma "Vi' (Viola). As we prepare to say goodbye to him this week and lay him to rest next to the love of his life, I have been pondering the many happy days I spent as a child with the two of them.

There were bike rides in grandma's 3-wheel bike 'basket' (yes, both my sister and I would hop in the back basket & she would pedal us up and down the street), picking cherries from the tree out back, playing hide-n-seek in the woods out back, watching grandpa carefully pot and fertilize his flowers in the greenhouse, picking roses off of the bushes, running through the sprinkler, the hummingbird feeder that he filled with homemade 'sauce' each day, grandma cutting our hair in the hair salon my grandfather built for her off the back of the house.

But I think what I will and want to always remember most is this: They were in love. Really truly, deep down, found-your-soul-mate-can't-live-a-day-without-you kinda love. I don't ever remember them raising their voices at each other (or anyone for that matter). I remember grandpa growing beautiful flowers for her every year to wear on mothers day. I remember him telling me the story about how they eloped with they were 17 & 18...and then spent a year living at their respective homes before they broke the news to their families. He talked about the years he spent away at war - and that after each return home a new child was born. My dad was the first.

I remember my dad telling me that they found stacks of neatly bound letter that they had written to one another while he was away at war.

Grandpa shared with me that after grandma lost her memory to alzheimers and she was slipping away, he would wrap her up each night in her favorite blanket and carry her outside to her favorite chair on the deck so that they could sit together under the stars. This was a chair he made for her.

I remember that he's visited her nearly every Sunday since she passed. I know that he wanted more than anything to join her again, and so he has.

It seems to me that this 'love' exists rarely these days and I wonder what has happened to us all that makes this the case? Has our world, and subsequently so many of us, lost the true meaning of what it means to build and hold and fight to hang on to (no matter what) those you love?

I miss you already grandpa. Thank you for sharing so many lessons in my life. Please tell grandma I send my love.