He Hung The Moon Poem by Bill Galvin

Ah… if only we all could make the most of what we're given, and only need to the level that we can afford, and be satisfied with it all.

After a long gabfest of basic human observation, and since there were no other customers, she walks to the back room of her store and comes back to show me a framed photo of her Dad, with his granddaughter on his lap. So proud was she, of this photo of Dad with her daughter; as was he, to be holding her, this flaxen-haired girl of his girl. He wears a plain ball cap… no holograms, no neon stitching, no trademark logos… just, "Pollock, South Dakota, Farmer's Collective" printed on it.

He was a farmer all his life, and it was a life that satisfied him to the fullest. Born to it, he sowed and reaped, and raised a family in the summer heat and blizzard cold on the High Plains, on the border line between the Dakotas… town population - 228, and shrinking.

So simple, the basic needs of life… to know and accept that what you have is all that you need… without wanting more.

He'd write to her while she was away at school back East; and she saved all the letters. He always included a nickel, a dime, and a penny minted in the year of her birth. So simple, and so thoughtful, she says… all year long, before any loose change passed from hand to pocket, he'd be looking through them for the ones that had his three daughters' birth years on them. He sent them along with the letters to them all… thinking of them while they were growing up, far away.

And the girls, raised on the farm, they would bicker and dicker and squabble and wrangle in Mom's kitchen to be the one who would walk the half mile or more to that part of the field where Dad plowed, or cultivated, or harvested… they would negotiate over who would bring him his loving lunch that day.

It is refreshing to hear daughters speak so warmly of the memory of their dads. I am fortunate enough to know a few… and, in each woman, you can see and hear their fully-formed character and sensitivity.

Her daughter called him "funny grandpa", for his laughs and his corny jokes. She says, "You would have thought he hung the moon for her, she loved to be around him so much." Well, seems like that apple hadn't fallen far from that tree.

His legacy was to hang the moon for all of them… but, weren't his kids and grandkids the light that shined back off that moon for him?

June 2017