Each night I go to sleep under Granddaddy's blanket.
I carefully stitched his nametag back on a few years ago.
When I gaze at photos of him now, I address him as Fred.
He is my hero.
I know he had his secrets.
His favorite horse was named Rosie, after a young woman he knew in New Mexico.
Rosie, literally, was a work horse.
When he was just out of high school,
a man he knew in town asked him where he was going to college.
My grandfather replied, "My father said there is no money."
Mr. Lawrence, the banker, said, "Your father can afford to send you wherever you want."
My grandfather escaped a life of farm work and went to Cornell to study forestry.
I don't know that he ever went home again.
He did write to his mother regularly: from Cornell, the Black Forest, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Washington, D.C. and Missouri.
He met my grandmother, Florence Hallowell, on the boat to Europe.
She was to go stay with her Aunt Sara for 2 years in France.
My Aunt Marion told me that Florence did not hear from Frederick for 3 years, until he was finished working in the Black Forest.
He went to Morais to see her and they were married in her home town of Chicago in 1906.
Their first child, Nathaniel, died after 1 day. The doctor held the forceps too tightly around his skull.
In 1910, my uncle was born. My grandparents named him Lawrence, after the good banker back in Ohio.
-Rowena Dunlap Burke
October 25, 2016
