The Summer Of 1963

When I was 12, things weren’t going so well in my home. That summer, I found myself on a train traveling to northern Wisconsin with my mother. Our trip ended in a very small town near Green Bay, and it began my wonderful Norman Rockwell summer.

We stayed in my grandparents’ home; and from the moment I stepped inside, my life became idyllic.

I remember that we slept with the windows slightly open, and how refreshing that was. My grandparents lived across the street from their parish church, and every weekday morning they would get up quietly and walk over to attend Mass.

Grandma Murray spent her mornings doing housework and laundry, using a wringer washer in her cellar. The shelves in the cellar were stocked with glass jars filled with canned tomatoes and green beans.

She always found time to say her morning prayers on the front porch, and to make a cobbler with fresh fruit for our lunches. My grandpa spent his mornings tending his large vegetable garden.

Every afternoon, I walked to the nearby river to swim with my new friends, 12-year-old twins Kathy and Karen.

Dinners were quiet and wonderful and delicious, and after them my grandparents would stand at the sink and wash and dry the dishes together. They talked and laughed, and even at 12 I could see that was their special time.

My mom and I spent the summer there, and at the end of August my grandparents gently suggested that we return to Indiana so I could go back to my grade school. I still remember sitting in the back seat of a car as we backed down the driveway, and watching tears flow down my grandmother’s sweet face as she waved good-bye.

We weren’t there very long, and I didn’t have a lot of contact with my grandparents after that. Life happened. I went to high school and college, got married, and had children.

But those life lessons remained with me, tucked neatly inside a special pocket, just waiting to be pulled out and used. And when I turned 60 and my daughter gave birth to my first grandchild, they came flooding back.

I knew, I just knew, how to be a grandma! I felt like I owned every life lesson to be one, and it was as easy as floating on a raft on a sunny summer afternoon.

At age 60, I remembered the agape love that my grandparents had covered me in, and I remembered the wonderful unconditional love that they had shown me.

We know that agape love is divine love, and that only God can do it perfectly. But sometimes He puts people in our lives who can show us His way.

I know that’s true, because that’s what my grandparents did for me in the summer of 1963.