I'm not certain that my children have even heard the term "Decoration Day"; if they have, I don't know that
they would recognize it as Memorial Day, or understand the history of the name. This is in spite of the fact that they have
grown up in a family whose livlihood comes from the making of memorials; in spite of the fact that when they were younger,
they looked forward to the weekend when they could join their cousins three mornings, as they helped put up over a hundred
large flags around the cemetery we owned, and three evenings as they took the flags back down before sunset. Before the weekend
began they helped with mowing and trimming, baking cookies, and painting the fountain blue again. During the days they handed
out flyers to visitors to the cemetery, helped people find the graves they were looking for, carried carried floral arrangements
and buckets of water, and handed out coffee and cookies to countless people. The highlight of the weekend was Monday evening,
as the extended family and families of our employees worked together to correctly fold each flag for storage for another year.
When all the work was done, it was time for a barbeque or a pizza party for everyone who had worked so hard all weekend. It
seems odd sometimes to hear them, as young adults, reminiscing about "the good old days", before we sold the cemetery...
It was even stranger, in this day when virtually everyone considers the Memorial Day Weekend a chance for
yard work, shopping, or a family excursion, that our oldest child was grown by the time that we first were free to go camping
at the beach on Memorial Day weekend. It was the first time in my husband's life that he had not spent the entire weekend
working.
How different their memories of Memorial Days of their childhood from the memories of those of my own childhood
- yet, maybe not so different. In those days, Memorial Day was still called Decoration Day by many, including my grandparents.
It was May 30, not a three day weekend, a day set aside to honor the dead by decorating their graves. On Memorial Day my family
went to several of the cemeteries where family members were buried to place bouquets of flowers we had gathered from our own
yard early in the morning. The weekend preceding the actual holiday, if it did not fall on a weekend, we generally went to
the cemetery at Chitwood, in the coast montains near Toledo, Oregon. My great grandparents, some of my great aunts and uncles,
and the children my grandparents had lost before my mother was even born were all buried there, on a steep, wild hillside.
Most of the graves were - and still are - marked by mossy monuments that tip a little more with each passing year. There was
always work to do there to mow and fight back against nature's attempts to reclaim the hillside as wilderness. In recent years,
and it has been more difficult physically for family members to return and continue that battle, as the memories of those
buried there fade and are gone, the wildness has all but recaptured the land.
When our work there was done, we would follow the highway to its end, to Newport, and gather with our relatives
- great-aunts and great-uncles, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins - for a picnic among the shore pines and, for the
more adventurous, a chance to explore the north jetty.
Over the years, my cousins continued the tradition, meeting at the Chitwood Cemetery to wage battle against
the wilderness, then gathering at the beach - now south of Waldport - for our picnic, rain or shine. Some years some of my
children and I went, just for a day, but it was difficult, with flags and flowers to be concerned about back home.
When our own family finally had the chance to go away together for Memorial Day weekend, we chose the beach
just south of Newport, and ventured out on the south jetty. We picnicked among the very shore pines where I picnicked and
played as a child. On Saturday, we joined my cousins further south for the traditional family picnic.
This Memorial Day weekend, it looks like we will be doing more of the things we didn't have time for on
that weekend for many years - yardwork and home repairs. But we will also be making time to visit the cemeteries where family
members are buried - those who were with us in those early years, who helped to establish our family traditions - our own
grandparents, parents, a brother, people we deeply miss, just as our grandparents deeply missed those who are just a part
of history to us today.
