You talk about big hands! Daddy could cradle a newborn in one of his hands like a doll. He was a 6'4" raw boned Swede who had never weighed more than 204 pounds in his life. I will always call him Daddy, even though he was actually my grandfather. He was the only real daddy I ever had.

I was a quiet sullen child, but Daddy understood me. We used to weed the garden together and plant potatoes and pick asparagus in the Spring. In the Fall, he would rake all the leaves up into one big pile right next to my playhouse and then lift me up on its roof to jump into the leaves time and time again. On Sundays he would sit in his chair (I don't know how they ever found a chair that big) and I would sneak up quietly onto his lap, and he would read the funnies to me. He kept the weeping willow trimmed just barely above the ground especially for me so I could hide in there. He never told me that, I just knew it.

Daddy worked as a guard at the reformatory all his life. When he retired, we bought a little 60 acre farm near Annandale and moved out there. He moved that playhouse for me too. He wanted a life closer to the earth. The farm needed a lot of renovation and he set right to it. That was June. Sometime during that Summer, a strange man and woman with a cute little blonde curly headed boy came to visit. They said she was my mother. (No she wasn't) On into the Fall Daddy worked on the barn and house, putting in gutters in the floor of the barn for drains, and putting a furnace and a bathroom in the house.

Then one night when we were watching our new TV, he said a weird thing. I don't remember what he said, but both of us thought it was a mighty strange thing to say. In a while, he got up to go shave (He always shaved before bed so his face would be smooth for my gramma). Something crashed to the floor in the kitchen and my gramma asked me to go see what was going on. Daddy looked sick so I told him to come back and sit down.

Within the hour he started leaning over sideways and being sick. I didn't like it at all, so I went outside to sit in my swing. We didn't have a phone, so I had to stay with Daddy while she went down the road to the next farm to call the doctor. I was eight years old and scared, but there was nothing else to do. I went inside so I could watch Daddy and hold the pan if he was sick again. I don't remember much else until the next day when the doctor was there. I wanted to go see him, and they finally let me in the room. When he saw me, he said, "Who's that little girl? Get her out of here!" They took him away in an ambulance that day and that's the last time I ever saw him.