Standing on the fresh December ice I paused to watch the morning sun peek  over the trees.  It was very still and the sun’s rays began to dance on the snow creating gold’s, yellows, and reds surrounding me.  My breath hung about me like a cloud in the frigid air as I watched and at that very moment I felt an overwhelming sense of timelessness.  Thoughts poured forth in my head and I paused once more ere I lay the chisel to the ice as I pondered my sense of peace and deep belonging to the scene surrounding me.
All the choices, decisions, travels and years that led up to that day on the ice were due in large part to the influence my Grandfather had on the early years of my life.  Gramp was a tall and slender man with large hands, and was always wearing tan dickie work clothes and a tan hat with a extra large black bill.   Born in 1903 in rural Maine, his early life was hard and poor and included losing a 4 year old son to polio whose grave bears  a single epitaph, “our buddy”.  An old black and white picture of the boy still hangs in the pantry of Gramp’s house, which is still in the family.  In those days work was scarce and mostly was only during the summer, forcing the residents of the small community to get by as they could which meant hunting, canning, and fur trapping for food and money.  Gramp had several different jobs over the years, but eventually fell in to becoming a gardener for a large estate on the Maine coast, which meant working all summer to live through the winter.  He had a passion for gardening especially roses, and my parents still continue the rose garden that he started many years ago, including some of the original plants.  Gramp was an accomplished woodsman and survived independently, raising and supporting a family with his knowledge of the woods, the water, and the land.
I was born in 1968 some 65 years after my Grandfather near Hartford CT and worlds apart from Maine.  Thankfully both of my parents kept close ties  to their hometown and family so I got to spend my summers in Maine as a child and even got baptized there.  My first memory of my grandfather was when I was four or five and in Gramp’s kitchen which was typical for rural Maine – there was a low ceiling with a woodstove in the corner that stood next to a copper water tank which absorbed the heat from the woodstove and provided hot water.  The tank had to be drained periodically if you didn’t use hot water or it would dance around it’s spot in the kitchen when the water got too hot.  The wood stove was later updated to a gas stove, but the copper hot water tank stayed until just recently.   I was sitting on the floor of the kitchen amusing myself with a big flashlight pushing the big button so the light would flash on and off on the “ice box”.  Gramp never stopped calling it an ice box as in the days before electricity the town used ice harvested from a local pond in the bottom of the ice box to keep food cold, storing the ice through the summer in the ice house which was an insulated house that stored the ice packed in wood shavings.  Ice packed in this way would stay cold throughout the summer months, and was delivered to the homes in town as needed.  Gramp sat down next to me on the floor that evening and marveled at the slide show I was presenting with the flashlight ohhing and ahhing and making a big deal out of each slide that I showed.    I always enjoyed visiting my grandparents and marveling at all the sights and smells of their home, and when it was time to leave  at the end of summer, my parents consistently had to drag me kicking and screaming to the car.
As I grew up my relationship with Gramp transcended from Grandfather and Grandson to one of friends, often sitting and talking for hours together.  During the summer months when we were in Maine I visited him every day, eagerly listening to his stories of the past, and his life and all the experiences he had.  I didn’t understand death at the time, but perhaps in the back of my mind I knew our time together was going to be cut short, and I tried to spend all the time with him I could.  Gramp smoked Winston cigarettes, and was rarely without one lit. He quit smoking in the house in the 1970’s so spent most of his time in the garage, where he could smoke, drinking Bellows Reserve whiskey and ginger ale out of Dixie cups.  I can still remember exactly how that garage smelled, the combination of whiskey, cigarette and wood  smoke, chain saws, and deer hides all combined over the years to create a sort of sweet lingering smell.  Gramp’s garage wasn’t neat, but it wasn’t messy either and he always knew where everything was.  There was a woodstove in the corner, chairs for people to sit, tools, chainsaws, traps hanging from the rafters, guns, whiskey on the bench below a sign that said “Harry’s private bar; open 24 hours“, a gambrel for butchering deer and a sheet to put over the window if said deer was shot illegally.  Centerfolds from Playboy magazine hung on the walls as did the names and dates of his friends who had passed.  In those days in Maine drinking during the day was an accepted practice, and the estate caretakers and gardeners would often congregate at Gramps garage for a drink at 9 am which was morning break.  I would sit with them, a child some 60 years their junior and listen to all their stories, taking everything in.  Ted Donnell, Clyde Carter, David Hyde, Tony Hamor, Elmer Green, Hap Haskell, Waldo Damon, Donald Bryant, Ralph Young, and Hughie Wright were part of the crew that would visit his garage.  As I sit here today I can still hear and see them in my mind.  Before 9 am Gramp would say he was having “apple juice” but after 9 he would  call it a snort.  Ralph Young used to throw his “nips” bottles in the woods on the side of driveway, and one day Gramp had enough of that and collected all of them and  threw them on Ralph’s lawn.   When Gramp and I sat alone together we would talk about everything under the sun, and I would ask him to tell hunting and fishing stories.  I remember once he told me he wasn’t afraid of dying and that he wanted to try one of those marijuana cigarettes sometime before he did.  Gramp taught me how to safely handle and shoot a gun, and I would always sit there just waiting and waiting for him to ask me if I wanted to do some target practice.
I begged and pleaded for him to take me hunting but I was never there during hunting season  in the fall, and over time the arthritis in his knees stopped him going too far in the woods so I never got to go with him,  instead he instilled the desire in me.     The town had a community post office, not rural delivery, and Gramp would get mail for some of the summer people and deliver it.  I would always ride with him and as he got older I would run into the post office for him where Dot the postmistress would hand me bundles of sorted mail and Gramp and I would go and deliver it.  Oftentimes there would be a 5 or 10 dollar bill waiting for me when I dropped off the mail in someone’s home and nothing was ever locked, I would just walk in and put the mail where I had been told to put it.  Gramp was also a  practical joker who loved to get a reaction out of people.  One morning long before the days of mandatory seat belt and helmet laws I literally rode “shotgun” sitting on top of the tool box in the back of his truck through town to get the mail holding a 12 gauge shotgun.   Gramp’s truck was a 1973 Chevy Scottsdale step side and had a standard shift with 3 gears on a column or 3 or three on the tree as it used to be called.  He taught me to drive that truck when I was 14, and would then often ask me to take him out for a ride to see if we could see any deer.   One day driving down to the village with Gramp in the passenger seat we met my mother walking up the sidewalk headed home after getting her mail.  We both swore at the same time, and took our time heading home where Mom was waiting to yell at the both of us for me driving.  Even the local minister wasn’t sacred, bragging one day that his potatoes were ready to be harvested before Gramps, we went to his garden by flashlight and dug a row of potatoes, replacing them with tennis balls and putting the plants back on top so it looked like nothing was wrong. Elmer, one of his friends that would come up for a drink, had a job cleaning the town green and beach.  Gramp wanted to have some fun with him so one night we bought a box  of condoms and a dozen eggs and filled all the condoms with egg whites and threw them around the town green. I could barely contain myself the next morning sitting in the garage waiting for Elmer to show up, a lean wiry man known for his temper, he burst through the door announcing that the damn kids in town had been down on the green fucking all night, which elicited a “you don’t say?” from Gramp.  Gramp also taught me to work, having me do odd jobs around the outside of his house.  I saved the earnings he gave me and bought a buck knife with them, which I still have and use.  Gramp put his initials on everything and he helped me etch my initials into that knife.
The phone call came just a few days shy of my 17th birthday at about 10 o’clock on a February night, and we traveled to Maine for the funeral.  I had lost my best friend and mentor, and looking at him there took a large piece of me away with him.  I remember walking up to my room once we got back to CT and staring for a long time at the present that had arrived in the mail from him while we had been gone, looking at my name and address in Gramps shaky handwriting thinking about how it must have been one of the last things he did, and struggling with all the feelings that were coursing through me.  Finally I opened it with shaking hands and tears dropping loudly on the box  washing out the felt tip writing.  It was a wool mackinaw just like the one he used to wear.  I tried it on and looked at myself in the mirror, sliding my hands in the pockets to find each one had a $20 bill in it.  It was the epitome of what my grandfather was, a wonderful and generous man.  I wore that jacket on all my adventures afield, until it was threadbare, and then I wore it a few more years.  I went to college the year after my grandfather died, in Maine, and afterwards moved to the town on the coast where gramp lived.  I self taught myself to garden, hunt, and eventually even trap.   I shot my first deer in 1997 with Gramps favorite gun, after asking for his help with the hunt.  Upon thanking the deer for its life I saved the empty shell and buried it at gramps grave.  Over the years of trial and error I have become an accomplished woodsman in my own right, and my friends are often surprised to learn I am originally from out of state.  Standing on the ice that winter morning on the beaver flowage I had the epiphany wash over me that Gramp would have been proud of who I am, and I wish I could have shared some time in the woods with him. But I carry his memory with me, so he has shared all of my experiences over the years, and I’ll be able to tell my stories along side his stories someday to a saucer eyed grandchild.