Grandfather was a bucolic old man with a beet red face and purple veins. He was tall and thin and creaked like a stick man when he moved.

He ruined the summer of my fourteenth year.

Each week, for the sake of family unity, I was obliged to visit the family cottage for the weekend. Back in the city, my friends would be having fun – which never happened when I was there – like being chased from shopping malls by arthritic security guards or sneaking in the backdoors of movies theatres.

At the cottage, Grandfather tried to pay me back for his own miserable life.

‘When I was your age, the chickens had been fed and the cows milked before breakfast,’ he’d say twice or more a day.

I was forever depressed about the Depression. But secretly glad that Grandfather had had such a hard time.

The cottage was okay in itself. An old tractor which made a fantastic noise and billowed blue smoke. A pond full of trout, which Dad treated as if each were a sacred beast, and bluffs leading up the ‘Don’t you climb up there, you’ll break your neck,’ escarpment.

What gave me the idea was the Turkey Buzzards, which swung through the sky as if on the end of a rope. Round and round they wheeled all day.

‘They look for field mice or shrews, then they plummet from the sky and seize them with their talons,’ Dad graphically imitated a Spitfire on a strafing run.

Mom left to get the bottled spring water, which was improvising the wrinkles on her face, and Grandfather lay rumbling away in his deck-chair. High in the sky, the rope spun the Turkey Buzzards.

I thought it appropriate to use the set of magic markers Grandfather had reluctantly given me for my birthday. In between the nest of five strands of hair, I coloured in a tawny shrew on his blotched head. Scrambling onto the cottage roof, I peered down and was amazed, at how life-like the shrew moved each time Grandfather grumbled.

No one had actually ever seen a Buzzard do anything but swing around the sky, let alone a Spitfire imitation, so I was as surprised as anyone when a dark cloud blackened the deck and Grandfather clutching the chair swung up into the sky.

They couldn’t decide if he died from brain damage or the fall from a great height. Mom says her skin is better now she doesn’t have to drink the water up north.

Originally published in White Wall Review 14 (1990)