The Forever Kind of Love
By Vickie L. King
My grandparents have all passed on. Now and then something will come up that makes me think of them, and a flash of a memory will skirt the edge of my mind, until I pull it up.
My grandfather on my mom’s side, or papaw as I called him, was a coal miner in West Virginia. I can still hear the rattle of his tin lunch pail, see the unlit light on the front of his hard hat and the black soot ground into his gray coveralls that no matter how many times my mamaw scrubbed them, they just wouldn’t come clean.
The two of them were as different in every way as any married couple could be. He was a soft spoken man, didn’t lean toward arguing and was hard to anger. Well, there was this one time, my mom told me, when Mamaw was in the hospital, and Papaw had to get the kids ready to visit her. He started the bathwater for my uncle, told him to take a bath and get ready. My uncle didn’t want to, and after my papaw left the room, my uncle sat on the side of the tub, until it overflowed and the water ran down the stairs. Papaw was angry that day.
Mamaw, on the other hand, ruled the roost. In that household, her word was gospel. She loved to laugh, and if I’m honest, she loved a good slice of gossip, too. She was a Methodist through and through, and while Papaw went to church with her, he didn’t claim a specific faith, but he believed. I have to admit, I learned my first swear word from her, and I got a swat with the fly-swatter for saying it. When my daughter was young, she learned that same swear word from my mamaw, too. Talk about tradition.
In looks, Papaw was tall and thin. Mamaw was average height and plump, that just meant there was more to love. How they were different didn’t matter. The things they were alike in were the important ones. They loved their children and their grandchildren, and they loved each other until the end. The end was when that coal soot finally caught up with him. He died on my birthday. I was nine years old.
Theirs was a forever kind of love. Even from a child’s viewpoint, I saw it. When I write, I like to create stories about that kind of love, the kind that lasts forever, the kind where the differences don’t matter—the kind of love that others remember, even if the person remembering is a child.
