I suppose you show your age in a thousand ways and none of the important ones are the way you look. My age shows badly when I remember holidays. For instance, I remember Memorial Day as Decoration Day.
That’s right. Decoration Day. Never heard of it? Well then, I’m guessing you didn’t live in a small town with its only cemetery on a small hill outside of town and you’re probably under 40 or 50 years old. So let me tell you about Decoration Day.
Decoration Day always came on the last day of May. It was the day when, early in the morning, an old man named Irving started the day by putting a flag up in his yard and playing “Taps.” He had served in the First World War and had come home with a damaged mind from all he had seen. Today we’d call it Post-Traumatic Stress, but back then, it was just weird Irving. He was one of the kindest men in town, but he drank way too much and he avoided as many people as he could. If you were a child, he smiled at you, but grown-ups he couldn’t handle. He told me once on one of his friendly days that he had terrible nightmares and rarely slept.
Anyhow, that’s how the day started. By midmorning, we’d picked all the lilacs in the yard along with any early peonies, put them in water-filled cans, loaded them in the car and were headed for the cemetery. The car smelled heavenly.
We headed first of all for the small cemetery miles away in a little community called Squirrel, which was where my grandparents had settled when they came to America from Germany. The little burial ground was by a dusty country road, totally neglected, weedy and desolate. The headstones looked tired and tilted with age, but Mother always knew exactly where she was going.
About halfway down the center road, she stopped and got out her hoe and rake and went to work. There was a small headstone there with a tiny lamb on top and it was my job to take some of the water and a rag and try to wash it off. I loved that lamb and as the dust and dirt came off, the name carved became legible.
Ernest William Harrigfeld. Born October 22, 1903. Died January 18, 1904.
Mom’s little brother. The tiny boy who only lived a few weeks and died in the bitterly cold winter. I would always finish cleaning off his name and then walk around the rest of the graves. There were so many little lambs and angels and graves of little children. They way outnumbered the graves of older people.
Mom finished hoeing and raking the gravesite and then put a huge can filled with lilacs near his headstone. She always touched the stone gently and then, gathering up her tools, we left the cemetery. Not many graves were decorated in that little cemetery, but my mother never forgot the family had someone buried there and on Decoration Day, she honored him.
Then we headed back toward Ashton and the cemetery on the hill. The grounds were crowded with people who had come to remember and leave flowers. My grandparents were buried in the far back corner under a huge black headstone with the word “Schaefer” carved on it. And that’s where Mom brought the lilacs and peonies and with gentle hands, filled the graves of her parents with flowers.
She never talked about them unless you asked specific questions. Today, I wish I’d asked a lot more.
On the way out of the cemetery, we saw graves that had been decorated by small American flags. They were the veterans who had gone from a small mountain town in Idaho to fight in a war in a place they had never seen or heard of. They were the ones who endured the horrors, slogged through the mud and slime, endured the cold and the pain and the loneliness for no other reason than they were called and they responded. America was their country and it was worth fighting for.
It still is.
