Missing Grampo

My sister Cyn and me with our beloved Grampo

Ortonville.

One word. A lifetime of memories. Ortonville is the small Minnesota town where my dad grew up and where our family went to visit his parents—Grammo and Grampo to my sister, Cyn, and me—for most holidays and just because, year after year after year. It was a second home to us.

I still get the Ortonville Independent in the mail, the newspaper that’s been run by the Kaercher family for three generations. Jimmy Kaercher is around my mom’s age and still writes a weekly column. His daughter, Sue, recently took over the reins of day-to-day operations.

In the January 28, 2014 issue, Sue wrote in her column, Sue’s Muse:

Another building is gone from Ortonville’s main street. The old brick building that stood on the northeast corner of Second Street and Jackson Avenue was leveled early Saturday morning. The building, which had been vacant for decades, was owned by the EDA after it went to the county in back taxes. Bricks were falling off it, windows were broken and the roof was in need of repair. It had become dangerous.

That doesn’t make it any easier to see it come down. It was a landmark to the community, part of the town’s identity. The building was referred to as the “Odd Fellows” building because it was built to house the meeting room for the Odd Fellows fraternal organization.

At this point, I had lost interest in the story because I didn’t know what building Sue was referring to. Just before I tossed the paper in the recycling, I glanced at the next paragraph and

Love Letters

While cleaning out my dad’s storage room four years after he died, I opened a file cabinet drawer and there they were: neat bundles of letters from my grandfather to my father. During my dad’s service in World War II, his father wrote him a letter every single day. My dad was the envy of his buddies, many of whom rarely received mail. More than once, my grandfather wrote to them too, at my dad’s request, so his buddies wouldn’t feel so homesick.

Daddy and Erin at Alnwick Castle when I visited there for a week

My dad was a carbon copy of his father—smart, clever, and kind-hearted. I did my best to carry the torch when my daughter, Erin, flew to England in the spring of 1998 to study abroad for five months at Alnwick Castle, not far from Scotland. Like my grandfather before me, I wrote my cub a letter every single day. Twice, I remember, I was in bed for the night until I was jolted upright by the realization that I hadn’t written her daily letter—so I hopped out of bed and fired up the computer. Erin kept her letters too, just as her grandfather had. And like my grandfather, I wrote to a couple of my daughter’s friends who rarely received mail from home and were feeling homesick.

The power of regular letter writing cannot be overstated. Even if