This is where I’ll be going Thursday morning come dawn:

This is where my father is buried, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. The man who taught my father to play Euchre, an Indiana tradition for those of us who came before video games, is there too, not far from Daddy’s grave. The old part in the right of the picture is filled with the old markers that don’t show up too well in faraway photos. My great-grandparents are in that section, way over to the far right. My father is on the left end of the left loop, next to his parents, When he died, we took him home.

Thursday morning I will have a large urn in the car, seatbelt around it to hold it steady as I follow the secondary roads he preferred. And a couple of jugs of water . . . and a single geranium to place on the inset patio square that protects Miss Alice’s ashes.

My mother and I have been making the trip every Memorial Day since 2000. She would drive down and I back . . . and she would sit there like a crash dummy in her seat, bracing for the accident that would claim both our lives and leave the estate in a mess or the fender bender that would cause need for a wrecker and a rental car and maybe band-aids. There were times I considered just driving into a ditch and ending her anxiety: “Okay, Mother, you can stop worrying about something happening now.”

There were times when I took  pictures of the backs of the trucks we would get stuck following for miles. We would take the old two lane roads she and my father took back in the 40’s and 50’s. I remember those trips from a backseat view – in a two door coupe so I couldn’t accidentally fall out a back door. Sometimes my father would tease me by asking if I wanted to go through Yeddo, a name I found funny.

Here’s Yeddo:

And here’s a picture of the country store courtesy of a flicker participant:

*****

WELL . . . this is a delayed continuation of the trip to the cemetery story. For the first time, Mother has decided not to go, to send me alone. I think it will be better like that – the trip is hard on her for she has become more anxious about things going awry in these past years.

So, Sydney is staying at Scott with Mother and Tiffany and the outdoor cat; I will go by myself and I will probably go extra miles just to be able to use the interstates and not worry about negotiating the scores of turns, stop lights, one-way streets and slow cars.

And at the cemetery I won’t have to worry about upsetting Mother by shedding some tears . . . because I so loved my daddy.