I was lucky enough to know all four of my grandparents.
One grandmother was a generous and prolific cook. There were always too many delicious things to eat at her house. Her kitchen was perpetually cooking, and the AM radio perched over the sink was always singing country hits to keep the mood light.
“Y’all come on” was her sung invitation to the Sunday afternoon dinner table.
My other grandmother was too busy to cook.
The preacher’s wife burned toast and swore by the economical merits of powdered milk. She drove all over town with a bag full of prosthetic breasts that filled the hatchback of her 1976 Toyota Corolla. A survivor of breast cancer in a time when surviving was rare, she spent most of her time after that life-changing event encouraging other women on the road to recovery.
One grandfather loved his Airstream travel trailer and kept meticulous records of the routes they had travelled with it. In the evenings he monitored local emergencies on a police scanner from his big swivelly easy chair. He ate a bowl of cereal every night before bed. He was an amazing storyteller.
The other grandfather preferred buttermilk and cornbread. He built furniture and toys for me and my brother that he concocted out of thin air down in his basement woodshop. He kept nails, washers and screws in reclaimed pickle and peanut butter jars that hung from the rafters overhead. Hundreds of bits of hardware and hinges and oilcans and glues stood at the ready for his next creation. He hummed and penciled out curlicues on unshaped scraps of plywood that miraculously took form as summer slingshots for each boy right before our eyes.
The carpenter, the storyteller, the healer and the cook.
They’ve all been dead for many years now.
It’s funny. The farther away they get in time, the closer and closer I can feel their presence. They fed me and taught me and loved me into being.
This Sunday, November 6, we will gather and celebrate the Feast of All Saints. We will give thanks for all the saints who have gone before us. We will call them out by name and remember before God all those people who formed us and fed us, taught us and loved us, and all those saints we never knew.
I hope you can join us this Sunday as we celebrate one of the great feast days of the church year:
The Feast of All Saints.
Who are yours?
David
