Editor's Note: This column appeared originally on 6-19-88

By Mike Robinson

On Bonnie Slope Farm, a peaceful patch of green overlooking Salmon Creek in Clark County, Grandpa Bill felt poorly this Father's Day.

Shingles laid him up last year and linger still, like a wireworm in his noggin. Last week, his vision blurred, one hand went numb. Showing off his new potatoes, his two kinds of lettuce and his onion rows, he slippered over the soil Sunday, and didn't have the zip to amble down to the south 40 to see how his corn is doing.

Bill's a singer by nature, but his prairie tenor lately has a hitch in it. He talks that drowsy way you hear in doped-up mothers after childbirth, with a post-surgical slur.

Around his house, the trees he planted 20 years ago hang close, like old pals peering in on his predicament. I learn their names from Grandma, who is his equal and sings her own song, too.

She nods at a pair of birches that front the place, a 30-foot spruce that shades the corner of the yard.

Other trees, a paradise, a hawthorne, rows of pear and plum and filbert, and stands of 60-year-old fir march down the hillside to the swampy ground around the creek.

I've come here often, mostly summers, when the green seems to swell up around the place like a wound, and in its crevice, the farmhouse hugs the earth.

We've walked the orchard up and down, gone fishing for smallmouth bass and carp in the sluggish pools, while we baked like gingerbread men in the old rowboat.

In all that time, I've gotten used to Bill's eager offer to take us to the garden, gather an armload of cabbage, ambush us with sacks of squash or beets or some of the more exotic vittles that crowd his salad factory.

Each year he hauls a bunch of summer squash and taters and beans to the food bank, and true to his first love, his family, makes sure each son and daughter gets a gunny-sack of his earthy prizes.

As you can tell, he is an easy man to love, though born Norwegian and capable of pregnant silences that have sometimes baffled his daughters.

Not having known him until I came to court one of those daughters, I read that silence, most of the time, as his inner nature speaking, and I guess it to be more like his daughter's own stillness than she seems to know — a reverie of long fields, with a fence for his horizon, the slow cows standing by as he passed, green corn blowing, the South Dakota summer grinding down, hot as the fender on a Farm-All.

I'm not exactly saying he's a dreamer, that he drifts away from the lilt of conversation like a kid catching a nap while his folks pass the lemonade around a neighbor's warm parlor.

I'm just convinced he learned his quiet way while he walked those fields, and that words, when they came along, were never quite as beautiful as music, nor as comforting as corn on the stalk, peas pushing up along a fence, the purple blush of cabbage, the juice of a strawberry under his tongue.

In that communion, whatever else he learned, he learned to be himself, and there is a goodness in that you can taste when he takes you out to the garden.

I have been honored by his honesty, and better yet, loving the daughter he raised on the same farm, I know him by the abundance of his love, and in these words, hope I can give him back a share of what he's given me.