Summers in Forestville
By Cassady Heaney


This essay is the winner of the Congregation Tifereth Israel Daughters of Israel literary prize for 2006.

Farms, creeks and rocking chairs have always been staples of my summer.  Every year during the second week of July my father would load my sisters and me into the car with out pillows and blankets in hand.  We would drive for hours across New York stopping at random diners along the way.  After about nine hours of driving everything would start to look familiar.  As we crossed over the small bridge with the yellow poles at both ends we knew we were almost there.  When the car pulled into the driveway of the large blue farmhouse our grandparents were already on the porch waiting to greet us.

While upstate our days were filled with running, swimming and exploring.  In the evening my father would round us all up for dinner.  Whenever the weather allowed it we would eat outside.  We watched as the sun gently disappeared behind the trees and waited until we could no longer see before going inside.  In the mornings my sisters and I would quietly climb down the stairs and head for the kitchen.  There at the table we would find a fresh box of donuts that my grandfather had picked up before we woke.   After breakfast we would go down to the creek and hunt for crayfish in hopes of adopting one as a pet.  In the afternoons we would go to fairs or play with the slingshots our grandfather had meticulously made for us before we arrived.  We didn't need a television or computer to entertain us.  Life seemed so easy there.

Every year we returned the village was the same.  It contained the minimum.  It had a post office, bank, diner and a gas station that also served as the grocery store, pizzeria and video store.  However the summer my grandfather died everything seemed different.  The village was exactly the same, but the house was different.  The lawnmowers were all packed away in the shed.  The tractor was covered with a tarp, and the cornfields that we spent hours playing hide-and-seek in had been cut down.  It was just my grandmother waiting on the porch to meet us when we arrived.  As I entered the house, I saw my grandfather's sky blue hat that was always covered in paint still hanging on the hook from last summer.  My sisters and I tried to spend our vacation like we always had.  After

settling into our rooms we pulled on our bathing suits and went down to the creek.  We splashed around in the waterfall like we did when we were younger, but it just felt different.

When I woke up in the morning after we arrived I crawled downstairs, still half asleep, and saw my grandmother sitting at the kitchen table drinking her coffee and reading the Dunkirk Times just as she always did.  But when I sat down at the table I saw a sad box of Top's donuts staring back at me.  This was the moment that I finally accepted that my grandfather was really gone.  I was expecting to see the plump delicious ones from the grocery store in South Dayton, which my grandfather would travel over an hour to get.  Those donuts were so large they had to be shared.  But these donuts that stood before me were small plain donuts from the local grocery store.

That afternoon my oldest sister and I set out on an adventure to find the grocery store in South Dayton.  We remembered our grandfather taking us there when we were little but could not remember exactly where it was.  Finally we found the store and headed to the back to where they kept the donuts and picked up the perfect dozen.  While we were waiting on line to purchase the donuts we couldn't stop smiling.  It was as if finding these donuts had brought back part of our grandfather.

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