Operation Memorial Day Flower was completed yesterday with a trip down to Kingman. I drove; the geraniums napped. This was the 21st Memorial Day for Daddy; it seems like yesterday we were looking at the just-placed headstone on that first Memorial Day trip.
My cousins met me at the cemetery – one of them lives a quarter mile (or maybe 1 1/4) from the rural cemetery. Their parents are buried there, as are our grandparents and great-grandparents, and who knows whatever relatives.
We had a little lunch at a picnic table at “The Oasis” in Kingman. It’s the type of place that you hear about in the song “Americana.”
There are little factoids that you hear and remember in life. Here’s one: For some reason, I know the man who taught my father to play Euchre, an Indiana tradition before video games, is buried very close to him. When I was at IU, it seems we all played Euchre – a different era, I suppose.
Between two cemeteries visited on Saturday and the one yesterday, more than one era was included. I’m talking horse and buggy times and hundreds of little stories I heard from my grandparents while knee-high. Everything from Grandma coming home from teaching in a horse and buggy and her father waiting at the end of the drive with a lantern to Great Uncle Roy dying at 12 when Grandpa was four to my great-grandfather’s picture in Civil War blue above the bed where I would sleep when in Kingman.
Daddy was born in 1918 in a pandemic (my grandmother was suffering from it when he was born) and in another pandemic we remembered those who have gone before.