I’m heading up north… for a couple of weeks.

A while back I wrote about the rides I would take up to Canada with my grandparents. We would tune the easy listening station onto the car radio… every easy listening station between here and Kingston, Ontario… and make the 8 hour trek though Pennsylvania, New York, and across the border.

The ride took forever, especially for a 13 year old, sitting with two 70-somethings.

Once there, my grandfather and I would work on the place together. He always had a project underway. Something as simple as sanding the wooden railing from the main cabin to the bedrooms, or as complicated as rebuilding the outboard engine for the little boat.

At night, after he would go to bed, my grandmother and I would stay up late. We didn’t have a television back then, so she and I would tune in something interesting, often a far away AM station on the radio, and then talk, play games, look at pictures, or just read.

She died in 1998.

That next summer, he went up alone. I went up to visit him with my wife. As soon as we got there, I walked down to the edge of the lake and sobbed.

There was so much of Mema up there, her books, her clothes, her little scribbles she would make while chatting on the telephone. Then at night, after Bill went to bed, and my wife called it a night, I sat in the den and took it all in.

I am not terribly spiritual. In fact this same grandfather is the one who often said God is what is in your heart. And that night, God and my grandmother were in my heart.

Bill continued to go up to the cabin for a few more years, but conceded after 2000 that it was very lonely.

My wife and I visited when we could, but we worked, he was retired. He had a lot of solo time.

The one thing he always liked to talk about was the great time he and my grandmother had up there. “She loved it up here,” he would say. And he was right. She did. They loved being there with each other.

After Bill stopped going up, the rest of the family would go up without him. When we all talked, the first thing we would mention was how different it was without him. He was more a part of the place than anyone. Visitors would stop by, ask for Bill, and say that same thing. He had been going up since the 1950s. A summer on Bobs Lake without Bill Hobson just didn’t feel right.

We would call him a lot, give him the local gossip, talk about how great the house looked, let him hear the loons in the background. Once we got home, we?d show him loads of photos, each pretty much the same as the photos from the year before and the year before that. He would gaze at them, and remember.

Bill died this past winter.

This will be my first trip up since then. And while I have gotten used to the place without him, he was always a phone call away and I always knew that some of the fun was telling him about his wonderful legacy.

I know the first night that I am there, I will pour myself a bloody mary, using his perfect recipe, turn on the radio and sit on the deck to watch the boats go by.

And I will feel Bill in my heart, next to Mema.

What we believe God to be will be there too.