Last Walk

The last time I saw Granddad Raver, he came to visit my family where we lived in Keller, Texas.

He was healthy, and he still camped and traveled long distances. It had been two years since my grandmother had died. He brought his dog Jenny and slept out in his RV, hooked up through the garage.

I was 19. He was 84.

We went for a walk one morning on the nearby trails. The trails in Keller are remarkable, especially for a small bedroom community of Fort Worth. They wind through parkland and woods and little meadows, all smack dab in the middle of suburbia. If you know just where to step off the trail, there's a dry stream bed where you can lay on your back at sunset, watching the fireflies appear, one by one, against the darkening sky.

I don't know if I knew he was going to die, or just sensed he had important things to say to me. But I paid attention. He re-told some of my favorites stories, one by one: about how he and Granny Kate met, about his adventures as a road grader, about getting bucked by a bull while crow hunting.

He talked about how much he loved farming, even though he had left it behind as a young man for road construction. He'd take a big breath in, as if he were smelling the dirt right then, and say, "Katie Ann, turning the earth and smelling it, planting the seeds and watching them grow, there's nothing like it."

He even talked about the death and destruction he witnessed in World War II -- something he'd never told me about before.

At some point on our walk, we sat down under a blooming pear tree, pink blossoms floating all around us, slowly falling to the ground. He signed, and with a slow, gentle smile, looked right at me. "Katie Ann, when you're with someone for 50 years, you miss 'em when they're gone."