I traveled to Wisconsin Rapids to celebrate Thanksgiving with my grandpa. He’s quite a grand old fellow. He is 88 years old and still preaches at his local church. After our Thanksgiving feast I had to find a vacuum cleaner to pick up after my kids. It was the same vacuum clean I remember from when I was a kid and my parents lived with my grandparents. It still works great after all these years. I’m sure it is quite a bit older than I am.

As soon as I get to grandpa’s house I always find myself headed to the cookie jar. It’s the same cookie jar they’ve always had out on the counter. Grabbing a cookie at grandpa’s house is as natural for me as removing my shoes is at my own house. It’s not that I’m desperate for a cookie — ordinarily I can take or leave store bought sandwich cookie. I found Oreos in the jar this time. I ate four or five over the couple of days we stayed there. Somehow when I’m at grandpa’s house I’m eight years old and I can’t pass up a cookie any more than I could pass up a free iPod today. I think I’m reaching into the cookie jar and I’m looking for more than a cookie. I’m looking for a sense that there are some things in life that don’t change. I think I’m trying to remember what it felt like to be eight and have no angst about anything at all.

I call it grandpa’s house but we all really know it’s grandma’s house. She put her stamp on everything she touched. She directed the vacuuming on Saturday. She picked out the colors that made the house so easy to find. She held forth at dinner, reading scraps of poetry or cute stories she had run across or telling us about something that happened long ago to people we would never meet. She isn’t present the way she used to be at holiday dinners, perched up on stool, eating on the pulled out cutting board ready to jump up and get something more for us. I hope she always feels a little present with us.

I took grandpa out to the cemetary. Grandma’s plot is just a stone’s throw from the family farm she grew up on not far from the Wisconsin River. “Bury me there too”, I told my wife. I want to hear the Wisconsin River gurgle in the spring; I want to be under the same sand that used to run through my hands. Bury me in Wisconsin, where the sand hills lie.

This weekend I thought a lot about what Pearl said about missed love ones being like amputated limbs complete with ghost pains. The loss I felt this holiday weekend wasn’t the loss of not having grandma around; it was the loss of her getting to see interact with my children the same way she used to interact with me.

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