A Long Walk with My Grandmother

My grandmother is eighty-seven and walks two miles every morning. This summer, when I was home from college, she asked me to come along.

We walked at her pace, which is slower than mine, but steadier. She knows every house on her route and who lived in them for sixty years. "That's where the Petersons lived, they had eight kids and a goat." "That tree was planted the year your mother was born." "That woman makes the best rhubarb pie in the county, but don't tell her I said so."

She waved at everyone. Everyone waved back. A man on a tractor stopped to ask how she was feeling. A little girl ran out of a house to give her a dandelion.

By the end of the summer, I knew the whole town through her eyes. I walk my own two miles now, in my college town. I'm learning who lives in every house.