My parents Rick and Donna stuffed my clothes into a pillowcase and left me at Grandpa Walt’s farm while taking my younger sister Paige to Orlando. I was only seven years old and could not understand why I was excluded from a family vacation. Mom assured me I would only stay with her father for a few weeks on his six hundred forty acres in central Kansas. Grandpa Walt offered no comforting promises but simply woke me at six in the morning to begin feeding calves and carrying heavy water buckets. I struggled with the farm chores and missed my family terribly at first. Grandpa Walt worked silently beside me every single day and never gave me tasks I could not handle. At the end of that first August he took me into his machine shop and used an anvil to stamp a slightly crooked number into a brass washer. He handed it to me along with an empty red coffee can and instructed me to keep it completely secret from my mother because it was my real payment for a summer of hard work.
That same arrangement continued every single year as my family took vacations to Hawaii and Italy while leaving me behind in Kansas. Each August Grandpa Walt drove me into town where we ate pie at the cafe before visiting the courthouse. Upstairs Miss Opal offered me peppermint candy while I practiced my handwriting by signing stamped agricultural paperwork. We endured severe hailstorms together and he patiently taught me how to drive his aging pickup truck when I was fourteen years old. He even defended me to the locals who asked if I belonged to him. During my final summer on the farm at age seventeen he handed me the eleventh brass washer and announced it would be my last one. We made our final visit to the courthouse where his attorney Mr. Barlow supervised my signature on three separate pages. I carried my red coffee can home still completely unaware of what those mysterious stamped numbers meant but finally realizing that leaving the farm now hurt much more than arriving.
My acceptance into the agricultural program at Kansas State brought another painful realization about my place in the family. Mom informed me that my college savings had been spent on household expenses and a summer dance program in London and Paris for Paige. My parents left for Europe and completely skipped my high school graduation ceremony but Grandpa Walt attended and arranged to pay my immediate college expenses himself. I moved to the farm permanently and eventually graduated to become a field agronomist for a local cooperative while maintaining a peaceful independent life. By the time I turned twenty three years old I rarely spoke to my parents. Everything changed early one March morning when farmhand Hollis Rucker called to report that Grandpa Walt had fallen inside the barn. He lay trapped for nine hours before an ambulance transported him to Salina with a fractured hip. My parents arrived at the hospital wielding a durable power of attorney from 2009 and immediately began making plans to assume total control over his medical care and his financial assets.