Memorial Day

Growing up, a lilac bush sat at the corner of our garage. The fragrance of lilacs always brings back a significant memory from my childhood. Each year, Mom would gather armfuls of lilacs to take out to the graves on Decoration Day (It wasn't called Memorial Day until 1968.)

It was something my family did. It was the only time of the year I remember visiting graves. There were two cemetaries we visited, one out the Lewiston Highway where there were the graves of my sister Linda, who died at birth, Dad’s parents, his sister Dorothy, his uncle Frank and some cousins. The other was in Albion, a small town nearby.

I especially remember the Albion cemetery. It was on, what seemed to me, a lonely hillside. It was old. Many of the graves seemed abandoned and the dates on them were from the 1800’s. Folks from my Dad’s family, uncles, aunts and cousins, were buried there. We would park on a narrow, winding dirt road that led part way up to the hilltop, gather the containers of lilacs and walk the rest of the way. I remember feeling an awareness of lives that had been lived fully before I was ever born. It was one of the first memories I have of personalizing history. Who were these people? What had they felt? What joys had they experienced; what tragedies?

We would quietly find the gravestones, dust dirt and leaves away and place the fragrant lilacs. Mom would explain the relationships between the names etched in the stones. I remember the sun shining and always a slight wind blowing there. I remember having a sense of my relationship to history. They were moments of my childhood in which the obsession with “I” began to fall away.