In the past few years I have written many times about the Burtonsville home of my grandparents, Albert and Rose Behnke. But I have to admit, I have never gone back to see it since the my grandmother passed away a couple of years after my grandfather's death. There were weeks and months of packing up belongings for auctions and going through tons of paperwork. But it eventually got done and the property was sold. At that time I was a young wife and mother spending my time making our own wholesale nursery a success, and I just never drove down McKnew Road. I would drive by on highway 198 and wave, saying "Hello, Oma and Opa" (that is what we called them), but I just never could bring myself to turn on that road. For the most part, my cousins and I loved going to visit our grandparents. The boys would be put to work pulling weeds and watering and the girls, well, we figured out early how to get out of most of that weed pulling and would end up inside learning to cook, clean, iron and more. So where am I going with this? Sometimes, memories have a way of just coming out and surprising you when you least expect it. For me, it came in the form of a wonderful woman who stopped by the nursery and ended up finding me. She and her husband were the couple who bought my grandparents' home. I always knew that it was sold to be used as a church, but was not aware that this lovely woman and her husband actually called it their home. We spent an enjoyable time talking about the house and property, and when she mentioned how sad she was that many of the plants that had been there disappeared, I took her to my office and gave her some of my grandmother's photographs of the gardens. She invited me to stop by and maybe, just maybe, I might someday.
-- Stephanie Fleming, Behnke's Vice President
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