Remembering Memorial Day?

Dearest Blog Reader;

I hope this finds you doing well. I am fine. This is a repost of a Memorial Day blog from two years ago. I shined it up a little and thought that it still holds up well.

I am enjoying this near summer weather on Decoration Day. I have no idea how I remembered that Memorial Day was called Decoration Day by Nellie Kincade, later Sharritt. Shoot all of the sisters (my grandmother and great aunts); Nellie, Mildred, and Irene called it Decoration Day in deference to the moniker given to it as it started after the Civil War. The last Monday in May, buckets of peonies were gathered from the sister's yards. Profusions of reds, or whites, or pinks were lined up in the back seat of the Ponitac Bonneville. Each year was a segregation of colors. This wasn’t for some decorative sense of style; a purist’s nod to sanity. No, it was an acquiescence to the variety of Indiana weather. The colors represented the heirloom standard bearer of an early, mid-season or late peony variety.

The decorators were covered. Early spring, regular spring, or late spring, it didn’t matter. They had a three week window of opportunity: so let the 80 degree March days reign. A fifty degree April could not loosen a single blue gray curl. Yet, while prepared, those tightly pursed Kincade lips were willing nature’s cooperation while steel gray eyes looked at the calendar, the sky, and the peony bed during the weeks leading up to Decoration Day.

Those pursed lips were freely given to a grandson and great nephew. Pursed lips clamped tight remind me of my elders as I catch a glimpse in the mirror after a hard day. A glimpse of pursed limps reminds me of those three sisters. Late May was the facial decoration every mid May on as they exerted their will to bend nature. It is hubris to think that the will of these three could make nature behave, but every Decoration Day had peonies on the graves of Pop, Uncle Bud, Irene, and Dad Kade and several other sites inside of Gravel Lawn Cemetery.

Gravel Lawn Cemetery was founded by the town fathers around the turn of the century, and Sharritt’s and Kincades are on the front row. Seeing that the little township cemeteries were too far flung and too filled with the good intentions of sloppy grave tending survivors, the fathers decided to consolidate the grave digging and tending duties to an on site superintendent. They could hire the superintendent, stoke his grave tending intentions with a pay check and their forebears would have well tended graves with little bronze urns affixed to granite stones that the town mothers would fill with peonies from the front yard every last Monday of May.

The father’s pooled their money and purchased 40 acres, and subdivided it so that the descendents of Fortville’s denizens could purchase 36 square feet at a time, or rather 216 cubic feet at a time. Gravel Lawn seems like an odd name for a cemetery. It is until you know the rest of the story. The Fortville fathers were tight fisted, with tightly pursed lips. They wanted to save as much money as possible. Looking around northwestern Hancock county, they found the poorest farm ground available and purchased it to bury their dead. As the geological fates would have it, the glacier decided to dump 40 acres of gravel on the edge of a stream bed. Then with persistence aided by several millennia, Lick Creek lowered the South boarder of the property so that in 1900 Fortville’s finest would not have to suffer the ignominy of “Rolling on the River”, (as Credence would sing it) should the creek rise during the spring rains.

While gravel makes for poor farmland, it makes for a great cemetery. Dark rich loam holds water. In the winter, the water freezes. Frozen water is frozen dirt which makes it very difficult to bury Grandma after she gets run over by a reindeer. With gravel the water drains away quickly, this leaves the gravel very friable even when the cold temps arrive. Rich fertile loam will help the grass grow lush, and thick in all but the longest droughts. Sod under laid with gravel will only grow buckhorn after June 15^th in all but the wettest of summers. That means not much summer mowing to do to keep the place looking tidy. Little mowing means fewer lawn mowers which means lower costs.

As you can tell, I have more than a passing knowledge of Gravel Lawn Cemetery. I have an inside baseball kind of look. That is because from time to time, during the busy season, before the purchase of a backhoe by the tightfisted fathers, my dad would help the then superintendent dig graves, or cut down trees, or grade the drives. Jim Girt was the superintendent. Ruth was his wife. They lived at the cemetery. In my memories, Jim was always as old as the dirt that he dug, and the kindest man I have ever known. His son was grown and had left home. He and my father had a relationship that spanned many decades and was one of mutual support and admiration. My father would help during the busy times and Jim would help on the farm when we spent a week each fall filling a trench silo with the forage that the dairy cows would eat through the winter.

Jim and Ruth knew what kids liked and let my cousin and me use their son’s bb gun while he and my father dug the 216 cubic foot eternity holes. They were also very smart because there were no bb’s in the gun. So my cousin and I would never be tempted to shoot one another on “accident”. Actually, no bb’s meant that our succumbing to temptation would have no long lasting consequences.  So on bright summer days, I can remember hunting for carpenter ants making their way across the ground and shooting at them from mere millimeters away. Invariably the spring loaded gun would generate a big enough puff of air that the ant would be “vaporized” and a little divot in the dust would be the only evidence of our dastardly deeds. In actuality, I suppose the ants were blown out of the field of our tunnel vision as we watch the devastation our evil intentions wrought.

I can remember doing that for hours while Jim and my father talked talk, checked their work and made sure the sides of the newly departed digs were straight, square, and six feet deep. Finally, they would be done. Ruth would come out with some tea. She would discuss with Jim the route to lead the procession through the winding lanes of the departed. The goal being to take them far enough that all of the cars made it off the road, to take them past sections that were newly mown, and to have the entourage lined up so that they could make a fast get away to the church meal that was awaiting the bereaved back in town.  

I remember standing off several sections away, knowing to be quiet and respectful but disconnected. I had no skin in the game. I did not know the departed. I remember thinking that these people were sad but all I really felt was a deep desire to vaporize ants, and I remember wondering if that was okay.  Today, I wonder, with a grin on my face, what those people in those big, black, shiny cars must of thought of two elementary aged, dust covered boys toting a bb gun, and “why were they staring at the ground so intently?”

There you have it; a wandering meandering walk through a memory that comes back every Memorial Day. All of those people described above now reside in the place they decorated and labored. I go by on hot Memorial Days near dusk and remember them and the others who have given me so much. People who taught me to keep my eyes peeled for the possibilities, who taught me to go “over there” and entertain myself, who taught me to know who I am and where I’m from.  

And as I wander from stone to stone, reading and remembering, I have my eyes cast down, looking for carpenter ants wishing I had a bb gun.

Take care,

Roger