I got the call from my mom that Opa had passed away while pruning a row of grapes this past Tuesday. Although it was a call I was expecting, I was immediately gripped with a wave of grief that I was frankly not prepared for when faced with this inevitable news. I’m sure it’s how many of us felt. Trying to reconcile the feelings of loss with the happy and heart-warming thoughts of a great life lived. I stood there crying in the middle of that row, and paused a moment to collect myself, then made the decision to continue pruning while saying a private goodbye to my Opa, John Van Moorsel. Vine after vine I was struck with visions of his genuine kindness and increasingly aware of how involved he was in all of our lives. I came to the conclusion quickly that he was truly a great man – and I don’t use that term lightly. He was foremost a man of family and faith and his legacy will live on in the wonderful children he raised alongside his beloved Nell (our Nanny). If you know the eight of them you understand that this was not an easy task by any means. He had a quiet confidence about him that I admired, and much like his patron Saint Joseph, his actions spoke louder than his words. Opa would have turned 96 yesterday, which is really a testament to the honest, hard-working way he came about his living. He was born in Holland those many years ago and raised on a farm, one of 12 children in his large family. He lived through German occupation in the Second World War, which he recalled vividly on many occasions. Those stories always had a way of putting things in prospective for me personally. His journey took him from war-torn Europe, to the waters of the Atlantic aboard an ocean liner, to Pier 21 in Halifax, to Montreal and eventually on to the cozy confines of Line 3 in Virgil (which is still an unimproved road by the way) Now normally I’d head in for lunch but I kept pruning on this day as the memories came flooding in. I looked down at my pruners at one point (old, rusted, falling apart, but at the same time sharp and wonderfully effective), they are what I know and you couldn’t pay me to use anything else. I thought then of a worn down old putty knife. A symbol of stubbornness and sheer will, this was the tool used by Opa up until this past year to weed his entire garden, which is massive and beautiful and would make any Dutchman proud. I thought of his goldfish pond, his love of puzzles, homemade applesauce and oliebollen, and how he knew exactly how many seconds it took on his microwave for a mug handle to go around and return to the exact place where he could simply reach in and grab it. Who else thinks of that? I then felt a twinge in my back and remembered the challenge of loading Fredonia grape masters onto his single-axle wagon with Daryl. It was really more teeter-totter than wagon, and with Opa at the wheel of the tractor, bouncing across the hard line 3 clay – well, you can imagine the fun we had slinging masters and successfully dodging Vietnamese grape pickers. Then there was his strangely low-hung tractor bay door, where he literally had to duck behind the wheel as he pulled in and out. Opa relished these unconventional contraptions and was always building or fixing something in my recollection. My mother described to me once her horror as she pulled in to find her 90-year-old father patching his leaky roof. This was a common occurrence at the VanMoorsel homestead – if you didn’t build it yourself, you went without. I thought of the family reunions at Uncle Hank’s and Uncle David’s, the banter he had with Nanny and how happy he was when Niagara finally got a Tom Hortons. I recall the single most thirsty moment in my life. It was one stifling early September day and we were picking grapes, Opa offered to go up to the house to get us a drink and returned to the field a short while later with an ice-cold pitcher of “Freshie”. My mouth waters just thinking about it. He poured a cup for Blair Cowan first and then for me. Before I could take my first gulp, Blair choked on his drink and violently spit it onto the ground – for Opa had forgot to add the sugar, and the Freshie wasn’t so fresh. I thought of family Christmas parties in this very hall, featuring Abba, Sinterklaas and Zwarte Pete and how politically incorrect that probably is nowadays. And I will never forget the joyful way he danced at all of our weddings and how adored he was by his many great-grandchildren in recent years. Everybody loved Opa. To end I will share a saying that he would use when seeing his children becoming distracted or upset: “Kalm aan, dans breek de lein niet” translating roughly it means “go calmly and don’t break the line”. He might say the same to comfort all of us here today. He will certainly be missed, but he will not be forgotten. Wes Lowrey