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Headstands and Breakfast in Bed
By Tracy Rae Hellerud
The following essay was the Grand Prize winner in our Greatest Grandparents Essay Contest!
When I think of my adoptive daughter-to-be living somewhere in Russia, I can't help but travel through the steps of my own childhood, steps supported by loving parents and grandparents. From the beginning, my grandparents held a special place in my life and in my heart.
Grandpa rocked me through my first Christmas Eve while the rest of the family attended midnight mass. When I was 10 and had trouble with a headstand in my gymnastics class, he got down in the middle of the living room floor and taught me how. After both my father and step-father died in the year before my wedding, Grandpa walked me down the aisle.
Grandma was the perfect farm wife and was known throughout the county for the best kolaches, buns and pumpkin pie. My brother and I helped her pack up the ham sandwiches and large thermoses of lemonade to take to the men combining in the fields. On those hot harvest days, with the wheat chaff in the air and the long swaths of wheat running along for miles, that lemonade was the nectar of the gods.
Staying overnight at Grandma's meant having breakfast in bed. We would go down to the kitchen to meet Grandma and help her prepare our eggs, bacon and toast. Then, with her help, we hauled it all upstairs to eat in bed. In those days, Grandma was fresh donuts on Sunday mornings, softly spoken prayers next to me in church and roast with all the trimmings for Sunday dinner.
Grandpa died this year and Grandma has shown me a magnitude of strength I would never have imagined she had in those early days. I have been blessed with role models married over half a century and pray that my daughter will soon be warmed by the seed of love they have sown one that will influence centuries to come.
