As May ends and the door of summer swings open, my memories turn to long ago days spent with my Mom and Grandma picking flowers for Memorial Day.
On Memorial weekend, they would gather up an old milk bucket, a pair of scissors, garden gloves, dampened towels and me, and off we would go in the old Dodge truck, down dusty country roads in search of decorations for our family graves.
First stop would be Grandma's front yard for armfuls of her beautiful peonies, both pink and white. Their perfume would fill the truck the whole time we were out, and I loved them the most out of all the beauties we would pick that day. Sometimes the rambler roses would be blooming, and we would stop by the side of the road where they “rambled” over the sagging barbed wire fences that made a feeble attempt to contain the gentle white-faced cattle grazing in the pasture beyond.
This is where the garden gloves were needed because the petite, fragrant roses hid a multitude of thorns. Mom would cut long strings of them and add them to the bucket. There were also daisies, white and yellow varieties growing wild by the roadside. We would always find an old homestead, the house long gone, but the flowers planted by loving hands still flourishing. There we would add a few purple irises to our bucket. Sometimes we would spy a bloom or two we didn't recognize growing wild, and we would jump out and add it to our collection.
Then back to the house we would go and arrange our treasure in vases weighted with marbles or small pebbles. When we got to the cemetery, mom would excavate a small hole near the headstones and gently settle the vases in. There weren't too many graves back then,just my grandfather’s, and my sister’s two babies. But we would wander around the cemetery, admiring the handiwork of friends and neighbors who had also made fresh flower arrangements for the occasion. Mom and Grandma spoke in low voices, a comment here and there about someone once living but now sleeping peacefully beneath the pink roses and yellow daisies.
I grew up and moved away, so I don't really know when the fresh arrangements gave way to plastic or silk blossoms. My sisters took over the task of decorating the graves when Mom and Grandma were gone and, for many years, I didn't visit the growing row of graves in the cemetery. But last year, as I surveyed the one lone peony on my sad little peony bush, the smell of that bloom transported me back to Grandma's front yard as I stood holding the old milk bucket while it was filled with fragrance.
So into the house I went, for a pair of scissors, gloves and the biggest bowl I could find, as I no longer had access to a milk bucket! Driving down the same country roads that I had traveled as a child with my mom and grandma, I found a myriad of the same flowers we had harvested long ago. I picked white and yellow daisies, found a few early ramblers blooming, and yes, even some purple irises. The last bloom I picked was that one perfect, pink peony in my garden. It would go on my grandmother’s grave.
When I got to the cemetery, many people had been there and beautiful silk arrangements brightened all but the oldest graves. I stood there and looked down the row, past the graves of the babies, of mom and dad, grandma and grandpa, uncle, niece and brother-in-law. I knelt by each one in turn, dug out a small hole up by the headstone and settled in the little vases.
I knew that, in just a few days, my blooms would be gone while all the other “flowers” would still be bright and beautiful. But still, I was happy with what I had done and thought it fitting that somehow I had come full circle. I think Mom and Grandma would be pleased.
Tamela Weeks is a freelance writer in the Gentry area. She may be reached by email at [email protected].
Opinion, Pages 6 on 05/22/2013