To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1
Three-day-weekend getaways, family barbecues, the Indy 500, and the unofficial beginning of summer. This is what Memorial Day, the last Monday in May, evokes in the minds of most people nowadays.
But when I was a child, Memorial Day was acknowledged on May 30, the date designated for it in the proclamation issued in 1868 by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic.
In fact, at our house we didn’t even call the holiday “Memorial Day”; for as long as I can remember it was always called Decoration Day. There was nothing special about it for us as far as holiday activities were concerned. Life went along pretty much as usual: the men worked in the fields, cows were milked morning and evening, livestock was fed, and eggs were gathered from the chickens. Meals consisted of the standard daily farm fare and were prepared and served as usual. For me, though, one of the special things that Decoration Day meant was that it marked the beginning of strawberry season and I could look forward to dining on shortcake every day for the next two weeks.
It was more than strawberry shortcake that really set the day aside, however, because this was the day that my mother and I gathered flowers and made a trip to decorate a dozen or so graves of relatives buried in two nearby Knox County cemeteries.
We had a certain ritual to our Decoration Day observances. Once the noon meal dishes were cleared — Mother washed while I dried and put away — Mother would get out her big butcher knife from the drawer and head outside to cut flowers from the flower beds that surrounded the house.
No special flower-clipping shears nor fancy flat-bottom baskets for the express purpose of gathering cut flowers were used by my mother. She didn’t believe in such fripperies. Instead, she just stalked up to the unsuspecting peonies, irises, gladiolas, and dahlias and whacked away. If daisies or phlox were in bloom they also were subject to Mother’s blade. A metal milk bucket filled with cool water to plunk the fresh-cut blossoms into accompanied her; when the gathering was done, she was ready to hit the road for our cemetery visits.
While Mother cut the flowers, I rummaged through the basement for the large-mouth glass canning jars that would serve as vases. We always had a fair supply of jars that had nicks around the top and weren’t prime for canning anymore, and those were the ones I looked for. I brought them up in a couple of bushel baskets and dumped out whatever dead bugs might be nestled in the bottom. I didn’t worry about cleaning them out any further; after all, once they got to the cemetery and were filled with flowers, there they stayed, never to be used again.
Our first stop was seven miles away, where Mother’s family, the Bobes, were buried — her parents, aunts, uncles, sister, brother, and cousins. The Bobes were not in a family plot, so to visit each grave meant a meandering drive along the cemetery’s winding roads until we located everyone. My job was to help her place the mixed bouquets into the glass jars and set them against the tombstones with the hope that they would survive for a few days; Mother could pretty much rest assured that the blossoms would still be at their peak freshness until her sisters arrived later in the day for their own cemetery deliveries, at which time they could nod their approval of Mother’s fulfillment of her memorial mission.
After visiting the Bobe graves we made the almost-half-hour trip to the cemetery at the Upper Indiana Church — also called the “Brick Church” — in a rather secluded area in the countryside a bit north of Vincennes. (Aside from the cemetery visits, we seldom traveled this far north in the county, except to attend the church’s annual picnic every August.) The McCormicks, my dad’s family, were entombed there. Like the other cemetery, this one was very old, with some gravesites dating back a century or more, including that of my first McCormick relative, who arrived in Vincennes around 1800 (he lived to be in his sixties). Mother knew the exact location of each gravesite of the assorted McCormick relatives as well as she did those of her own family.
Mother went from grave to grave, arranging the flowers in the canning jars and setting them just so. If she was in a section that had several relatives together, she would let me wander among the gravestones, looking for those with familiar names. Some stones were so old the engraving was worn almost smooth from exposure to decades of weather. Several markers bore the names of young men who had died in the Civil War. For the most part, the names and information on the stones meant nothing to me. Still, the ground I walked on was hallowed, and I felt a sense of awe for the spirits of those who lay there.
My ancestors were not fallen war heroes. They were everyday people, farmers and their wives and children, whose lives simply had ended. But Mother’s dedication to their memory was no less because of that.
These days, if you were to tell someone you had spent part of your holiday in a cemetery placing flowers at the graves of relatives, they would most likely think you had a few marbles missing. Why would anyone spend their time doing such a thing?
Tradition played a role, and of course family pressure — what would sisters and aunts and cousins think of Mother if she didn’t make her visit? — but beyond that I believe she felt a sense of responsibility to the memory of these people, some gone so long that anyone who had known them was also long dead. They were family, and by honoring their memory a part of them was kept alive, and the family bonds strengthened. After all, knowing where and from whom we came is very much a part of who we are.
Mother always seemed somewhat matter-of-fact about the task, and I never saw her pause for prayer. The cost was minimal, a little time, a little gas, and some flowers from our own garden. Yet, at each cemetery, as we got in the car to head out, I gazed across the landscape and marveled at the deed. Where only lonely gray stones and grass had been, splashes of bright color decorated the scene. The beautiful flowers, whose heads bobbed gently in the late spring breeze, would be wilted and faded within a day or two. But for now, life had visited the cemeteries, and memories of long ago had been revived.