Grandpa loved the dam.
He’d often spend the last of the working day or some of the evening sitting on the edge of the dam. Occasionally he’d smoke a cigarette and occasionally accompany that with a glass of wine. He engaged in a sort of quiet contemplation. He neither read, sang and, as far as we could tell, never spoke to himself while there.
Surprisingly for an otherwise somewhat parsimonious man the wine he drank at the dam was always high quality and quite expensive. This was quite a contrast with what he drank with his friends at the local sports club - beer from the tap. Unlike any other alcohol he drank, he bought the wine online from a vineyard a few hundred kilometres away.
He never offered anyone a glass of this wine though if you had asked it’s unlikely he’d have refused. It was his wine and his habit. It was as though he didn’t think anybody else would want to share his habit or his wine. It was part of his ritual of being alone for a few hours at the dam.
Towards the end - though at the time we didn’t know the end was approaching - Grandpa spent more and more of his evenings at the dam. Not drinking or smoking more, just spending more time.
And then there was the evening he didn’t come back.
Nobody noticed until the next day. Perhaps Grandma did but she said she’d not been concerned as the dam wasn’t far away and Grandpa had on one or two other occasions come back quite late.
It wasn’t until about 10:00 am that we started to ask ourselves where Grandpa was. Who had seen him? When? And then we realised nobody could remember seeing him since the evening before.
Someone went to the dam and came back to say he wasn’t there. Some of us started looking in other areas of the farm - the outbuildings, the nearby orchard but it wasn’t a thorough search as at that time nobody believed he’d disappeared and nobody thought he wouldn't reappear any minute .
It was after lunch - about 1:30pm we started to get serious. We called the sports club , we called neighbours and then we called the police.
They called divers and when the divers came they searched the dam while other police and a whole army of volunteers searched the outbuildings and the orchard and then fanned out further across the nearby paddocks.
It was not really a surprise when the divers found him. Where else could he have been?
What was surprising is what they found with him. In his shirt pocket was a photo of a young woman taken many years ago and in the dam near the spot where he was found was a glass bottle containing letters.
They turned out to be letters written some 50 years before. Written to Grandpa by a woman whose name we’d never heard of but whose surname was associated - we found out - with a vineyard. The vineyard that made the wine that Grandpa drank.
I don’t think grandmother knew.
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