It’s been a year.

It’s been a handful of homemade ice cream churns on summer nights.

It’s been a dozen phone calls that start with “Look out now, Mr. David Ray” and end with “Alright, partner.”

It’s been a few letters to local officials who weren’t doing their job.

It’s been 365 walks around the block with a partner-in-crime named Sally.

It’s been numerous conversations about “what needs to be fixed around here.”

It’s been too many meals of barbecue sandwiches and sweet tea.

When you put it like that, it’s been an eternity.

Not a day goes by that my mind doesn’t float back to granddad. Sometimes it’s in the middle of the night and sometimes it’s just the smell of grass. What I’d do to see him again.

This morning, I sat in the front yard with my grandma, who was missing granddad a little extra today. She decided to throw on some work clothes and weed the garden, just like he would have. I know he smiled down on the two of us doing work he would have usually done. Even though the conversation steered from school to Braves baseball to my little sister growing up, it came back to A. Donald Allen.

We shared stories and memories and jokes and laughs.

“I miss him everyday,” she said. “It feels like more than a year sometimes and often a lot less.”

“Time is relative, I guess.”

It is.

I know that even though it might be decades of time here on earth–time is a relative thing.

And it won’t be long before I’m with you again, granddad.

DA