Tribute to my grandfather

The following is a reflection I read at my grandfather's memorial service on Sunday, January 31.

Papa is a scientist. He is known for his love for physics and birds, and a few of us grandkids also learned to love those things because of him. I am possibly the least scientifically minded in the family, so I can’t say I’m one of them…. So the things that remind me of Papa are a little bit.... unique.

If there is anything that will make me think of Papa every time I see it, it's garlic mustard. For those of you who don't know, garlic mustard is an invasive weed that spreads very quickly.

Every summer from the time I was three years old until the year I turned thirteen, I would spend a couple of weeks with my grandparents. We would always spend some time in our family cabin in the woods in Ohio and some time at my grandparents big house in Nashville, TN. This is something that all six of us got to do at some point, I believe, some for longer periods of time than others. I never went to camp as a child, so this was sort of like a replacement for that. 

When I was lucky enough to be one of the first grandchildren of the summer to go on this trip with Nana and Papa, Papa often wanted help pulling garlic mustard out of the woods. So he would pick a spot and we would spend hours at a time out in the woods, pulling the stuff, piling it in bundles and then burning it in a fire. Of course, the earlier in the summer we did this, the better- because we wanted to make sure that the seeds didn’t spread. I can still picture Papa, covered in sweat, walking towards this bonfire and throwing bundles of garlic mustard into it.

Earlier this year, I was out on a hiking trail in Lancaster and saw some garlic mustard. The urge to pull it was almost unbearable. So I guess instead of a love for science, what I inherited from Papa was a hatred for garlic mustard.

But seriously, as I think back over the years, the memories of swimming in the neighbors’ pool, canoeing at the Glen in Ohio, going through this little deck of bird cards and trying to memorize bird names, will always be with me. And while he hadn’t been able to do this much during his last years, I can still picture the grin he would get on his face at the dinner table, right after he would come out of nowhere with a witty joke.