Since folks asked ------- ages ago my mother’s father was killed in a mill accident. Or murdered by a coworker. That could be a subject for a future MMP. But anyway, this was 1943 and things happened. Gramma Rose was left with a couple teens (my mother being one of them) and several adult children who quickly drank up what money was left. Three years later, Dad and mother got married and started their life together. Dad really cared for his mother-in-law and wanted to give her her fondest wish for Mothers Day ---- a headstone for her late husband who was in a still-unmarked grave. She wanted a place to put flowers for Memorial Day and something she could touch.
The problem was Dad didn’t have much money. Caring for his MIL, a wife with a kid on the way, and everything else meant he was kinda strapped. But he always was one to find a way. One of the granite corner markers in the cemetery had gotten hit by a car and broken so he was able to buy the broken piece cheap, and Dad had a cousin back home who could do some fair stone carving. So roughly $40 (not an insubstantial sum back then) got a nice, if simple, headstone for grand-dads grave. And Dad had it in place just after Mothers Day so everything was ready for the approaching Memorial Day. From the time I can remember, getting the flowers just right around that stone was a big part of what Memorial Day was to me; and time spent with Gramma Rose and hearing the memories she had to share.
Fast forward to 1984 when Rose finally joined he beloved husband. There was just no way to add her to this simple stone and we all knew how much headstones meant to her (so many relatives being in unmarked graves forever) so some of us made the decision to chip in and get them a nice stone big enough for them both. Dad made the arrangements with the cemetery and monument place and all. What was going to happen to the old stone? Oh, we’ll probably just toss it in the landfill section.
Not in my family, you ain’t. It went home with Dad and be put it in his front yard under a pine tree that had been a Mothers Day gift for Rose in her later years. And there it set beside the steps until the end of March. When my brother called me about getting anything I wanted, the stone and the desk are the two things I told him I would fight for if I had to. In fact, first trip over there, I had a wrecking bar and shovel in the car for getting it out of the ground. Before mother landed in Florida, it was in the back of our Subaru. I had no idea what I was going to do with it but I knew it was staying in the family.
I had several ideas. One was to cement it into the basement floor just to freak out furnace inspectors ---------- durn city regs won’t let you bury even a dog in the back yard. But doing the flowers around Rose’s grave and thinking of the love for everything growing that she instilled in me, just inside our vegetable patch seemed the most appropriate place. OK --------- it may freak out a neighbor or two and that isn’t a bad thing either. But ----------------
So its in the place it needs to be for now. Instead of flowers, it has tomatoes and peppers, but its there. And a nice memorial to all the people and all the past that have come together to form what I am., silly as I am
So ---------- the expected pre-hijack question. What memories does Memorial Day bring out in you?
I’m debating whether or not I want to go to the local graveyard to see the official 