A Heavy Heart

This past Sunday my grandpa K passed away. He was 102 and lived a long and good life! He lived in his home until the very end and had his wits about him. I pray that I am that lucky when its my time to go.

Some of my best childhood memories were with my grandpa. He was one of a kind that's for sure. My grandparents lived in Tekamah which is about an hour away from Omaha. I LOVED going out to their farm to stay the weekend or a week. It was great.

I remember that my grandpa would always give me an important job to do. One of those jobs was to organize and clean one of their kitchen drawers. My grandpa would tell me if I found any money in the drawer I could keep if for all my hard work. I thought that was AWESOME!! Years later I found out that before he gave me that job my grandpa would dump a handful or two of change into the drawer for me to find. He was kind and wonderful like that.

Since my grandparents lived on a farm, they had a big red barn that I loved to play in. In the hayloft my grandpa turned it into a playground for me to play in. He must have spent hours making it child friendly. He took old tires and made various swings out of them and then hung them from the rafters for us to play on. There were a lot of good times there.


My grandpa loved to work in the garden. He spent hours taking care of his vegetables and my grandma's lillys. He even let me help out too. I got my own little section of dirt by their house for me to plant whatever I wanted to in it. Honestly, that only lasted one season. I chose dandelions and those purple thistles to plant. Hey- as a kid those were the only "flowers" I could pick and didn't know that they were really weeds!! So why wouldn't I chose those? Plus living far away I wasn't around enough to really take care of anything. Its still a really great memory though!

When I was with my grandpa I was never without Oreos or ice cream with hershey's chocolate syrup out of a can. We spent lots of time playing Kings in the Corner, peggity and kerom (sp?). I will really miss my grandpa. He was a wonderful man. Very supportive and kind. Some people say when you get married you marry someone like your dad. I didn't do that. I married someone like just my Grandpa Kjeldgaard and I am so blessed for that!