This morning I woke up to milk, eggs, and orange juice on the front porch (well technically they were inside by then because Jershon brought them in when he left for work.) It was only 6 am. 🙂 I have heard about Winder Farms for a while now but finally decided that it would be fun to try them out. I just ordered a few things this time.
As I was putting the food away in the fridge, I started thinking about my Grandpa Marchant- Evan Harper Marchant. He was a milkman.
I’d like to think that he helped to deliver the bottles of milk to me this morning. He would probably think it was neat to get to do an early morning milk delivery, just like old times – only this time would be extra special because he would be delivering milk to his granddaughter and great grandchildren. Maybe he went along for the ride?! 🙂
What I didn’t anticipate from this tiny little thing (getting milk delivered to my door) was the instant connection that I would feel to my Grandpa. I never met him. He died before I was born. I don’t even know much about him. My dad didn’t talk about him much (although my dad doesn’t talk about any of that kind of stuff very much.)
I wanted to see if I could find anything in the Marchant family history book that we have about Evan’s job as a milkman so I read about him. There isn’t much recorded, but there are some excerpts from Evan’s mom’s journal. He sounds like he was a really sweet boy. He some hard health challenges though. He got appendicitis when he was 9 and he had to be in the hospital for 5 1/2 days. When he was 16 he got scarlet fever and it took quite a while to recover – in fact he had to be quarantined and live in the garage with his mom for almost a month.
When he was 47 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and lived with that for 16 years until he died in 1982, at the age of 63.
When I read about that and realized how young he was when he died (and how young he was when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease), I just started crying.
I started thinking about my dad and how he was only 31 when his dad died. 31! That’s young. That’s only 2 years older than I am right now.
I don’t know what kind of a relationship my dad had with his dad but I’m sure that it was very hard to lose his dad when he himself was still so young. I haven’t ever really considered before now how my dad has potentially been affected by his dad’s death (and him having Parkinson’s disease for so long.)
Anyway, it’s interesting how this tiny little milk delivery sparked all of these feelings and I now have a greater desire to learn more about my Grandpa and what he was like.
This morning during breakfast, I told the kids about the milk that has been delivered to our door. I told them about my grandpa and that now, every time that they drink milk, they can think about him and remember him.
