Clayton Ralston

Here we are! Me and my Grandpa! We were best buddies, and this picture was taken on his farm in Iowa. I wanted to be just like him, and if our caps were off, you'd see our matching flat-top haircuts. I wore overalls just like he did, too. I followed him all around the farm, helping him with chores and other important stuff. My mother's old doll carriage made a handy farm wagon, and Grandpa would hand me things for hauling so I'd feel useful.

My grandfather, Clayton Ralston, was born in the late 1890's. He was a farmer most of his life. He was a hired hand on my grandmother's girlhood farm, and that's where they met and fell in love. My great-grandfather did not approve of his daughter falling in love with a hired hand. According to my grandmother, one of the main obstacles was the length of time my grandfather's family had lived in this country; Clayton was not a first-generation German-American. Things got so divisive that my grandfather left and became a cowboy on a ranch outside Flaxville, Montana. If you look it up, you'll see that it's within spitting distance of the Canadian border.

My grandparents continued to pine for each other, and wrote each other regularly. Grandma told me that he begged her to move to Montana to marry him and live on the ranch. My grandmother would have none of that; as she told me, "Why would I want to do that, and have to cook and clean for all those men? I told him no." There's a blurry photograph of my Grandpa, sitting at a table with tins of tobacco spread across the table. When I asked Grandma about the picture, she explained that they only went to town once a month, and that was my Grandpa's monthly supply of tobacco.

Clayton returned to Iowa, and my grandparents eloped on Christmas Eve. My grandmother told me that there was a bad snowstorm that night, and their wagon got stuck as they were returning to her father's farm to tell him the news. The first person who happened upon them in the stranded wagon was, of course, her father. He was not at all pleased. He drove them back to his farm and told my grandmother to go in the house - and instructed my Grandpa to follow him out to the barn. Grandma said she was afraid she was going to be a bride and a widow on the same night. Instead, her father told Clayton to pick out his choice of the horses as a wedding gift.

In the summer after I graduated from high school, we went to Iowa to visit my grandmother. We rode out to the cemetery where my Grandpa is buried, and then we rode through the surrounding farmland. We drove slowly past the farm where she grew up, and she focused on a thicket of trees and bushes. "See there?" she pointed, looking at me with a twinkle in her eye, "Clayton and I used to go there to spoon." She turned back for another look and fell silent.

I'm thinking of Grandpa today as I remember him from the above picture. A visit to their farm was a dream come true for an adventurous boy. My grandparents would also spend long weeks or months with us in Virginia during the winters. He was my hero and best friend. When I would come home from kindergarten, we would play Uncle Wiggily, a board game similar to Candy Land or Chutes & Ladders. We played this game daily, and he took it as seriously as a game of chess. I would snuggle up next to him when we watched Lawrence Welk and Gunsmoke on our black & white television in the evenings.

Grandpa died on St. Patrick's Day when I was five. They were with us in Virginia, and his heart had been giving him trouble. I talked my mom into letting me eat breakfast with him that morning in the guest room before I went to kindergarten, and he seemed to be feeling much better that evening. We were sitting together on the sofa that night, and he got up to get his eyeglasses off the fireplace mantle. He made it halfway across the room. Nothing could be done to save him. Today, I can be glad that I got to eat breakfast with him that morning - just us two best friends - and that I was with him that night when he took his last breath.