My Mother's father was named Lewis. I have always called him Pap-pa. He was a veteran of Anzio BeachHead in Italy during WWII. He carried a bullet in his leg underneath the skin till the day he died. As kids he would let us feel it and you could move it around a little. It felt like a small marble to me. He was a great man and an excellent farmer.
He was so important to everyone who ever met him. I will never forget driving with him in his pick-up truck with a bed full of tools and junk. We would drive out to look at the fields and we would talk and talk. He would pull over on the side of the dirt road and get out. While talking we would walk out into the middle of his field and pull a single weed that had the nerve to poke it's head up since the last time he had checked. He would shake the dirt out of it's roots and toss the weed into the ditch. This happened so often that I never gave it a second thought. Only later did I realize that not all farmer's fields were as free of weeds as Pap-pa's.
I remember visiting an elderly couple to buy some brown country eggs from them. They did not have much and lived in a sharecroppers house left over from when people still lived on the land that they farmed. Pap-pa told me no matter if I wanted one or not, if they offered me a bottle of coke I should accept it because refusing would insult them. He would visit with them and ask about their children and buy eggs from them because he told them that he could not get eggs like theirs in town. Then we would leave and on the way back to his house in town we would run into someone he knew and he would tell them that he had these extra eggs and give them away. Whether or not it was pecans he picked up from his wood-lot, sweet corn he grew just to give away or brown country eggs, Pap-pa was a generous man. I miss him so much
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