Leaving Mom’s farmhouse behind, Ricka and I walk the country road. It’s August 15 and sixty-four degrees this early Saturday morning in northern Minnesota, and I carry the blanket. My girl and I talk on the way, and I think of the words Husband and I fixed in our hearts and minds, the ones we taught our children when we sat at home and when we walked along the road, when we lay down and when we got up.
Ricka’s grown up now, but she speaks the same words we did—ones she’s secured in her own heart and mind—ones she keeps.
We talk about her life then and now, from water to wind—then the waters of Minnesota where she grew with us and now the winds of North Dakota where she grows with her new husband.
Mom’s Australian shepherd mix, Wulfie, trots along, maybe listening. He switches between sprinkling the ditches and sniffing weedy tufts that line our gravel way. Birch trees shake their green coins in the breeze, and wheat fields are white unto harvest. We’re almost there.
The last stretch of our 1.1-mile walk takes us to the end. We pass beneath the tall wrought iron sign and locate Dad’s grave. The years are buried there, and I feel them all. I don’t recall sun in this lonely place, and even now it’s overcast; a cool mist dampens our skin.
We spread the old hand-tied quilt I brought from Mom’s on the ground near Dad’s resting place, slip out of our shoes, and sit. Wulfie flops onto the patchwork fabric with us and demands belly scratches.
I gaze at the grass around me and picture walking in it, grounding. Dad’s been off his feet for two decades now and months before that too, if you count his time in the hospital bed.
I tell Ricka about the day of her grandpa’s funeral almost twenty years ago, about how she—five years old at the time—stroked his face so much I wondered if she’d wipe off his mortuary makeup or if her heavy leaning in would tip his coffin. She needed to grieve that way, I say even now, and so I let her then. She remembers.
We go quiet. The mist eases; the grey lingers. We rest in the Word, make notes in our journals, and I rub the dog’s flanks with my bare feet. A distant train whistles, leaves sputter in the wind, birds chitter.
We breathe in the new mercies of the morning, the words on the way, the sound of life around us—so much life around us.
It’s time to walk back.
Ricka at Grandpa’s grave, August 15, 2026. Wulfie joined us.
Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka at Grandpa’s grave, summer of 2007. Two kittens joined us.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka and their husbands (present and future), Snipp, Snapp, and Snurr.