Happy Memorial Day everyone~
It seems a bit strange, certainly out of the ordinary, to not be visiting a cemetery today on this the official calendar marking of Memorial Day. For years, more than I can even remember, I've gone to the graveyards where family and friends are buried and brought flowers to adorn their final resting places. Decorating graves has always been a tradition with no excuses made in our family and I credit my dear and now sainted mother and grandmother for instilling that solemn practice in me. Today it is different and I know that they would understand. I'm nearly 650 miles from the places that I used to go to, the places they are now resting in. But today as I sit here at the table in my new home in Montrose, I am remembering them and the many times I spent walking those hallowed grounds with them by my side.
From early on, perhaps as early as I can remember, I was taught that the practice of honouring and remembering the dead was a special privilege. We went to the cemetery often, not just on this final Monday of the month of May. The kids in my family, well we learned right off the "get go" that entering the cemetery grounds was the same as entering a very sacred and most holy of places. It didn't matter if your favourite song in the whole wide world was playing on the radio, the music was silenced as you turned into the drive. We became quiet, solemn and most reverent. I can still, with a smile on my face, remember my mom admonishing us kids to "stop walking on the graves". We were little and as little kids are often accustomed to, we paid no attention to what we were doing. To this day, I never go across someone's grave. My mom would be happy, I guess :)
As I got older, I still continued to go. Many times, I went with my grandmother and found it to be like having a "walking lesson in history". Grandmother Brown knew so many of the folks who were buried at the city cemetery, just outside of Halstead, Kansas. Row after row, we would walk and she would tell me stories of who the people were and how it was that they came to die. As she got older it became harder and harder for her to walk with me, so I would just drive her around and she would tell me where to go and somehow or another Grandmother would get out of the car, cane at her side as she slowly made the rounds.
Just north of Halstead on the Halstead-Moundridge blacktop, there lies another cemetery that is tucked into the fields in the northeast corner of the road. They call it the Fairview Cemetery but it in my family it was always referred to as the Quaker Cemetery. Many years ago in the late 1860's, my ancestors on the Brown side of the family came to the Harvey County area as Quaker folks. They had left their home in London, England decades before and made the journey to the "new world" of America. They helped to establish not only the Quaker school but the Friends Fairview Quaker Church in Harvey County as well. The school was just across the road to the west from the cemetery and it was there that my mom attended school for a few years. Buried in the cemetery there is my great-great grandmother, Rebecca Burch. A monument just outside of the gates to Fairview is dedicated to her as the last living pensioner of a Revolutionary War veteran in the United States. As a kid, it almost seemed weird to me that I would have a great-great grandfather who was a veteran of the war of 1776. And if you are trying to do the math to figure that one out, well I can save you some trouble. LOL Great-great grandfather William Burch took Rebecca as his bride when he was in his 70's and she was barely 30 years of age. The generations of my family have been spread out since then. I'm proud of my Revolutionary War heritage and I'm so grateful for the soldiers who have fought from that war onward. For the record, I hate war as I am sure everyone else does too. But if we have to be at war to protect our freedom here and the lives of Americans abroad, then I say with my whole heart a words of thanks for the soldiers who do so.
Although my mom and grandma are no longer living, I will never forget the lessons they taught me in this life. On this Decoration Day of 2013, I pause for a moment in this morning to remember them. I know that there are lots of people who prefer to never visit the cemetery, even some who are afraid of going. Everyone has the right to do as they wish on that account. But for me, I'm really glad that I'm not fearful of going, in fact some of the best visits that I've had with either my mom or grandmother have come to me as I stood at their graves, tears rolling down my face. I will continue as best I can from a distance so far now, to visit their resting places whenever I am back in Kansas for a visit. My memories of them and so many others are now stored in my heart and nothing, absolutely nothing, can take them away from me.
When my time comes to go, when God says "enough" for a little girl born "Peggy Ann Scott", I'll be laid to rest in that little Quaker Cemetery right next my Great-great grandmother Burch. I love the location there, quiet and peaceful, surrounded on all four sides by beautiful fields of Kansas Hard Red Winter wheat. You know, I think she would like that, to realize that someone who never even met her in this life would love her enough to say "this is where I shall be placed." In the years to come my friends, I hope someone will honour all of us as well. God's blessings to you guys, all of you. Still working on that "homesick" thing, but it gets better! Love you all.
One final visit to the cemetery before leaving last week~my parents and my brother are here. My sister and niece not too far away. A very peaceful place, full of quiet and solace. I love the pastoral setting of it all. The older I have gotten, the more I realize just how important of a place it has been in my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment