She didn’t look at me.
“Brittany’s getting married at Okoboji,” Mom said. “A real wedding. Right on the lake. At the Inn. With a tent on the lawn and a band from Des Moines.”
She said it like it was the best news in the world. Then she passed me the mashed potatoes.
Grandpa Earl had been gone four months.
He died in October, in the hospice room at Greater Regional in Creston, with the window open so he
could hear the combines. He was eighty-seven. He’d farmed that ground since 1956. He’d been born in the farmhouse on it.
Every summer of my life, he walked my sister and me down to the pond on the back corner of thatPlan Family Trips
eighty with two cane poles.
The pond was nothing special to anybody else. Maybe an acre of water, in a low spot between two hills, with a dam at one end that Grandpa built with a borrowed dozer in 1971. Cattails along the
