My husband's grandfather passed away last week. In black and white that doesn't look like much, but it was. He was old, and sick, and weak. Well, his body was. But his spirit was still strong and vibrant, and every inch the man that my husband grew up loving and admiring. The man whose eyes glittered with life, and whose voice rang out strong with a warm welcome to "Come in! Come in!" The man who stood up in the pew at church and clutched a closed Bible to his chest because he knew the words by heart as he gave them forth to the congregation. The man who was born on the same day as my daughter, 89 years earlier. The man who inspired respect and admiration, not just for the years he had lived, but because of how he had lived them. This wasn't just any man. This was our BoBo. And we miss him.
To pay our respects and remember his life with other family members required a trip to southeast Missouri, to the town where my husband lived his boyhood, where his grandparents are living their last days. We've been back to visit several times since we married, and though I always enjoy the time we have with family, I've never particularly liked the journey to get there. But this time was a little different. Maybe because my heart was tender and my eyes were a little red with grief, or perhaps because life has been so busy lately that the monotonous hours in the car finally allowed my mind to be at rest, for whatever reason, I found reasons to smile, and admire, and wonder along those many, many miles.
We traveled many county highways and country roads past fields upon fields of toasted corn stalks and verdant soy plants. The farm houses, with their tidy yards and soaring silver silos never grew old to me; the orderliness of it all had it's own kind of beauty. Most of the fields were uniform, either the dry corn plants, stooping in the sun, or the low and lush soy. But one set of fields defied the norm, with rogue corn plants sprouting like undiscovered geysers from the surrounding soy. Those corn plants were still green and straight, unwilling to bow to the cycle of farm life. That's perseverance for you. And downright rebellion. And hope.
Along the way we stopped at a place I've visited only once before, a tiny state park nestled in a sliver of Illinois. On my first trip to Missouri, on a very cold day in December, my future husband and I stopped and took our picture here. I was in awe at being in the very place where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet, and wanted to document the fact that we were there. It remains one of my favorite pictures of us.
This time when we stopped, we were joined by our two children, and it was a fresh experience. The rivers were full of barges and noisy tugboats and everything about the landscape seemed to have changed. We found some beautifully sun-bleached trees that the kids climbed on. My son, as most 5 year-old boys, enjoyed throwing rocks in the rivers, lamenting when he missed because I wouldn't allow him closer to the water. I pointed out the spot where you can see the currents of the two rivers meeting, to convey some of the wonder in that moment in that place, but I'm not sure it worked. No matter. That's the magic I find in that place. Perhaps his magic was found somewhere else, in the soil beneath the rocks he pried free, or the heft of those rocks in his hand, or the arc they made as they traveled down the overgrown bank.
On this trip to honor the dead I was reminded again of all the humor and grandeur and beauty that comes with living. Whether it's roguish stalks of corn or mighty rivers meeting or my children's hair shining in the sun, there is so much to see, to wonder at, to be thankful for in this life, even in the face of death.
