Grampa’s corn was irreplaceable

The old man was born on a hill west of Davenport. The livestock clamored from an 1820 barn outside the bedroom window. He remembered when he was a boy and the laborers dug trenches for the tarred pine poles that would electrify the state. The land still held arrowheads, and he saved a tomahawk he'd found creekside. He was a son of the soil.

He was born before penicillin, insulin, frozen food, canned beer and bubble gum. Radios were first sold the year he was born.

While he laid in a hospital bed at age 94 his nephew, hoping to raise his spirits, tiptoed to his side then whispered, 'Uncle Les, there's a light snow so we can follow the rabbit tracks. I'll pick you up at nine in the morning.”

That Wednesday, the doctor said he wouldn't make it through the day. Congestive heart failure, clots and age would overtake the hardworking old man. He died five days later, 50 feet from the room where he was born.

His granddaughter said, as if confessing, that when she fed her four children Iowa sweet corn they wouldn't eat it, 'unless it was grampa's corn.” She tried to fool them but … 'grampa's corn” was irreplaceable.

He began farming with horse and mule, and he learned most of what he knew from parents and grandparents. He could see the one-room schoolhouse he attended when he tossed his first dirt clod, toward the southern horizon.

When the Second World War broke out he was given a bye as the sole son on the family farm, but he felt compelled to ride the service train alongside his friends and neighbors to St. Louis. He cheered them and memorized their names. He could recite each one until his last year.

His hands - unrestrained by today's neon world of keyboard, circuitry, chip and motherboard - pried delicate seeds from tiles and made levers to lift plows like the Greeks had done in Pythagoras' age. Each problem was an opportunity, each crisis resolvable.

'I remember him running from shed to barn to house. He never seemed to slow down,” a relative said.

His was the age of industry and ethic. When someone had conflict, they talked about it. Therapists had not yet intruded their theories upon the landscape.

He was remembered for his grit and ready answers to life's questions.

A child or grandchild or great-grandchild, in tagging behind the nimble farmer, yelling for him to wait, would hear his routine in the echo ahead -

'Wait broke the bridge!”

He loved to play with words; alliteration, palindrome and onomatopoeia.

Pop goes the weasel, drop daring danger.

He was always moving.

In the hospital a nurse asked him where he'd like to sit.

'On my butt,” he said.

When asked about a season, in any particular year, he recalled weather, deer tracks and the harvest. He could have filled volumes of discourse on agriculture, carpentry, welding, electricity, hydraulics and veterinary science.

But he was a humble man. He never bragged that his family settled the land in 1849 or that they gave land to the railroad or that the county benefited from their philanthropy. He liked to mispronounce his hometown as 'Donna who” (Donahue), leaving the message of Ecclesiastes that all things are vain.

He carved branches and sticks, turning nature into symbol and art, and he worked a jig as well as any man in that county. He left behind dolls, toys and furniture that he'd made, repaired or reworked.

He learned to play the guitar. He wrote poetry.

On his last day, a bald eagle soared above the hill and a rabbit ran into the trees he planted, its tracks whispers in the fresh snow. The 200-year-old barn seemed to speak, creaking and rubbing its aged rafters when the wind drew high. His last breath on a beloved Iowa hillside was drawn where the picture window held long views of the horizon and it brought his family to his side.

The 'I love you's” quieted the wind then and the old man left his family a smile.

' Tim Trenkle teaches at Northeast Iowa Community College. Comments: trenklet@nicc.edu