Being the oldest grandchild, I got to experience more with my grandparents than my sister or my cousins. Memorial day preparation was a ritual my grandmother, Reba, would spend a couple days getting ready for by attending to her grandparents graves as well as her parents. Her mother’s parents are buried in a small cemetery in Chester, Indiana that once was a Quaker meeting. My Allen ancestors had lived just north of this cemetery where they were in charge of the toll gate leading north on Arba Pike. She would bring soap and water and a scrub brush to remove the bird droppings and dirt that may have accumulated over the year. The next stop would be Goshen Cemetery (also a former Quaker meeting) on State Rd. 227 just south of the small town of Middleboro. This cemetery contains many Thomas relatives (my grandmother’s father’s family). Even though we only would clean her parents and grandparents graves, there were three more generations of her ancestors buried here. After the cleaning, she would return home, take tin cans, clean them thoroughly and wrap them in tin foil. She would then go out to her peony bushes and clip blooms to place into her “vases” to place on the graves.
The conversations we had while spending time cleaning and preparing the stones are long forgotten. But I do remember they were about stories of the family many of them fun memories or treasured moments of the past. I never knew my great grandparents, my grandmother was the only connection to the past. Two incidents involving the cemetery are ones I will never forget. The first is a story Grandma told of herself and her sister Hazel. They were looking at stones at Goshen after the decoration service and Hazel was backing up to read one. As she was doing this, she backed into a stone at knee level which caused her to tumble over backwards into a back flip. Grandma said she got up so fast worrying about if someone saw her. Of course they got to laughing over the situation. The next involved my grandmother and myself cutting down shrubs near the Allen tombstone. They had gotten to be to big and needed to be removed. So, we took garden shears and a blanket to place the branches in and set out to work. She placed her car as close as she could so we wouldn’t have far to drag the branches to her trunk. After we had cut the shrubs down to the root, we placed all the branches on the blanket and drug them to the car. The task of getting the blanket up into the trunk was more difficult than had planned. We then got tickled trying to move the large “body” like mass of blanket and branches. Anyone driving past the cemetery would have thought we had dug up a body and were trying to load it into the trunk. The more we struggled with loading the branches, the harder we laughed. We eventually got it all loaded and back to the farm to dispose of there.
So, this Memorial Day like many before, I grabbed a Mason jar, made sure it was clean, clipped some peony blooms from my bushes that came from starts of hers in from the farm, walked to the cemetery where her and Grandpa are buried. Her favorite flowers were yellow roses and my rose bush is just now putting out buds and blooms. So, I cut a couple and added it to the arrangement. I placed the vase on the flowers on their grave and thought of all who have come before me. Not many of our ancestors were famous or sometimes the greatest of persons, but without their lives, I wouldn’t be here. So, thank you, all of my ancestors for the gift of life. I will do my best to keep your stories alive in my family for generations to come.