At dinner that night, the table was filled with roast beef, mashed potatoes, sautéed squash, homemade biscuits, and jellies. It was the typical homemade farm meal that I was growing to love.

            Today, I miss those meals like nothing else. There was nothing like the way Grandma Mimi cooked. She cooked from scratch. No microwave dinners. No biscuits in a can. No jelly from the store. All her own creation.

            That night, after a day of near silence, we barely touched our plates. We sat there moving the food from side to side. The lack of conversation got to us. I didn’t know what to say so nothing was said. The continued quietness of our grandfather weighed heavily on our minds.

            He was like a time bomb we waited to go off. We waited quietly, still. He had yet to show us his true explosive self. The one we had grown to imagine. His silence was cutting. His scowling face was intimidating. His limited deep voice riddled with the harshness we were expecting.

“What is with the two of you?” Grandma Mimi finally asked. She knew more than she was letting on.

I shrugged my shoulders.

Grandpa Jack spoke up, sternly, “Your Grandmother asked the two of you a question!” Even at a normal volume, his deep voice was intimidating.

            Darby thought for only a second before speaking up first. “I guess we don’t know what to do or say. We don’t want to do or say the wrong thing. We are sorry. But we were also curious as to what you're hiding. Those journals in the cabin, sure, we shouldn’t have but now we have seen them. We're more curious now or for me anyway, even more suspicious of what they are. Are they true?”

            Mimi looked over at Jack but didn’t say a word. She let it all play out without getting involved. She knew we'd been searching for the keys that morning. She watched as Darby dried the dishes and put them away. She watched Darby open an extra drawer or two while putting things away. She also knew I had been searching for the keys in her room. She knew I had knocked the key holder down and didn’t say a word. She knew it had to happen.

            Jack, stumbled over his words answering Darby back, “It seems this farm doesn’t have enough for a pair of twins to do. They spent the morning in the cabin reading my papers when they should have been doing some chores or chasing frogs or something of that nature.” He then looked at Mimi with a “can you believe the two of them” expression.

“I am sure they found the journals more interesting than anything else we have on this farm and wasn’t it them that you said you were writing them for? Future generations I mean,” Grandma answers.

            “No! It was research for the university,” he answered with an uneven anger. “You know that, as well as I do.”

 Mimi continued, “I'm sure these kids are interested in all that research you did all those years ago”

            She knew his research was his story more than anything else in his life and she loved him for it. She loved him for the passion in him that it stirred. A passion she saw in his eyes that day she met him back when they were both attending graduate school. To this day, the desire he had for his dreams and this quest for knowledge continued and she knew it would not end until the day he died. 

             She also knew that since my father, their son died, Jack’s thirst had ended. The spark he had in his eyes had dimmed. She hoped this opportunity to have us up there would bring that spark back. That night at dinner, she saw Jack fighting it. But it was much too late for him, like a crumbling dam with water about to burst through, his guard was cracking and all the emotions he held in were about to come pouring out. He was too late to stop where all this was going.

            “Kids, why don’t you give Grandma and Grandpa some time alone to talk,” Grandma said.

            “Sure,” I said as Darby, and I slid off our chairs. We headed for the front door to the porch. We realized Grandma Mimi was an ally. She was going to help us.

We'd find out later how the conversation that night would go. After we went outside, Grandpa got up and walked over to the kitchen sink to rinse off his plate.

“And just where do you think you are going?” Grandma asked.

            “I might as well go out to the cabin and get my journals,” he told her. “I know full well there is no arguing with you on this one. We’ve been together far too long for me to try and put up a fight that I know I won’t win. But it all stops at the journals on the giants - nothing more,” Grandpa told her. She thought it was cute the way he tried to lay down the law.

            She joined him at the sink. “I think if you start with the journals on the giants that will be just perfect. I think they’re going to love you for it. And it’s a history lesson. How could you argue with that?”

            She put her loving arms around him and gave him one of her best hugs. She was sure that all his years of hard work were finally going to pay off the dividends of that work. It would be the first time anyone outside the hallowed halls of the university would enter the world the two of them had uncovered. She also knew it was going to be hard on him to do it. He had been through some very tough times as it related to his work and his writings. It was hard for him to believe so clearly in something that other people found hard to understand. Mimi was hopeful that so much of what they had sacrificed would have some positive outcome. She thought that maybe, just maybe, someone, maybe even their own grandchildren, would know his mysteries to be fact and believe them as much as Grandpa Jack did.