Spring

I started my day walking into work with my grandmother.

Every spring morning that is sunny and crisp with patches of dew kissed daffodils here and there, is a morning I get to walk with my grandmother. It may only be as long as it takes me to walk from the car to the office but, in that time, I'm a child again and we outside in her garden or walking to town or hanging out laundry or some other chore. But always I am by her side again and we are enjoying the smell of wet new grass.

I ended the day with my grandfather, her husband. I've never filled my mower's gas tank or smelled gas anywhere else that I didn't think of him. So, as I mowed my spring crop of wild onions, he sat under the pine tree in a plastic lawn chair whittling his cedar stick and spitting tobacco juice to his left. Every once in a while I caught him smiling at me, especially as I mowed around the peach tree I planted in his honor last year.

She will be 98 in September 2010. He died in 1998 when he was 88. I couldn't have asked for a better day.