Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

Decoration Day to Memorial Day

By Julie Carter

Memorial Day is all about remembering the fallen, the honored, those gone on to their great rewards, traditionally in the service of our country.

However, before life became complicated and I understood all those things, it was simply "Decoration Day" to me and we decorated all the graves of all the kinfolk, military or not.

Decoration Day was delightfully fun for my siblings and me. It was a much less organized family reunion of sorts. But, instead of meeting at some park or at a relative's house, we met at the cemetery.

My dad's side of the family was quite extensive. My grandmother was one of 12 children of a German homesteader and my grandfather was one of seven born and raised there.

Apparently, at the time, there was a large number of them still alive and living within a day's drive to the Colorado high mountain valley where it all began. There, where the roots of the family tree were first planted on homesteads, farms and ranches.

The cars and pickups of every age, size and color would pull up the hillside in the old pine tree-shaded cemetery where our clan had claimed resting ground since the 1870s.

Kids would roll out of the vehicles first and begin running up and down the pathways, seeking familiar faces and space to blow off the hot crowded car ride.

Trunk lids would raise and as chattering voices carried on the late May breezes, shovels, rakes and buckets and buckets of flowers would appear.

There were fresh-cut pine and spruce boughs, irises by the dozens and lilacs with a strong fragrance that wafted through the piney woods.

I don't know just how or who got it all done, but shortly, every grave would be clean, orderly and with a fresh bouquet. My grandmother would, as she did every year, explain to us who this person was or that name and how they were related.

She would laugh with me at the given names of the time - Hulda and George Washington Baker was just the funniest, I thought.

As we wandered through the many tiny tombstones that told a story, she told me about the flu epidemic that took so many children in 1880-82. Each marker bore the tale of the horrible loss of one, two and more children in the same family that died, sometimes within days of each other.

With history reviewed and duty done, we'd all pile back in the vehicles and travel off to have a huge picnic lunch; somewhere that allowed us to leave the propriety and reverence behind us while got reacquainted with kin folk that we might not see again until the next May.

Today, all I can do is recapture those moments in memories. Families have scattered far and wide and that tradition, at least for my immediate family, got lost in the miles and with my generation. Those same graves are now tended by an enduring uncle who faithfully looks after our history.

Quietly every year, I gather my son and we stop to pay our respects to his grandfather here in New Mexico. Along a little-traveled road in a quiet country cemetery, we chop back the weeds, reshape the dirt and place a new bouquet of bright flowers in remembrance.

His tradition is different but in keeping with mine, the reverence is the same - honoring those that came first, from a world they never could have imagined.

Julie can be reached for comment at www.julie-carter.com