~as we have remembered the dead~

From the heartland of America, the great plains of my home state of Kansas I send a "good morning" to you and best wishes for a wonderful Sunday.  This is my third day back here in the place that I called where "home" was for many long years.  It's been nice to stay with family here in my hometown of Haven and to see many of the sights that are so familiar to me from the days of my youth.  It's been a gift to have slowed down a bit, to have stored up many more memories of a time when life was not near as complicated as it becomes when we grow up and have to start being responsible adults.  My greatest worry as a teenager was "Would I have enough money from my tips working as a waitress in my folks' café to fill my gas tank and go with my friends to eat pizza at the 4th Street Pizza Hut in Hutch Friday night?"  Then we grow up and get out on our own, something we desperately wanted to do in the first place, and find ourselves faced with the issues of adult life.  And so we worry about paying the mortgage, keeping ourselves healthy enough to stay out of long term care for as long as we can, and hoping that our children and grandchildren have a wonderful life ahead for themselves as well.  As much as we would wish to worry about it or change things in any fashion, it is what it is and they call it LIFE.

Yesterday I had the occasion to go to the cemeteries around Haven to visit some of the graves of folks that I have known from growing up here in south central Kansas and as I traipsed through the wet grass going from grave to grave, I decided something.  I believe that of all the holidays that the calendar marks each year, Memorial Day will always be the most special to me.  Yep, without a doubt I am going to say that the last Monday of the month of May each year is the most beloved day of my choice and here is why.

I have had the chance to go to five different places of rest, graveyards for the dead in the past two days.  Each time as I began to walk amongst the burial spots of family members, friends and total strangers, I felt as if I was in a sacred and holy place.  The truth is, that I WAS.  Row upon row of headstones told the stories of those folks, known and unknown to me, that have gone on before us all.  A person can learn a lot of history from the dead, that is if you are willing to go to the cemetery in the first place and pause long enough to read some of the messages they have left to us.  At the Laurel Cemetery, between Haven and Yoder yesterday, I watched as a son reverently paused at his parents' grave and then bent down to pull out the grass and weeds around their markers.  He honored and followed the commandment to honor his father and mother.  Other small groups of people cautiously drove along the cemetery path, taking care to stay on the trail so as not to harm any of the gravesites.  I never thought about it before, but what an act of respect that is.  When we were kids and our parents were taking us to the graveyards to visit our family members there, my dad always reached over and shut the radio of the car off just as soon as we approached the entrance.  In the years to come when we kids were old enough to drive our parents there ourselves, we always just automatically did that to our car radios too.  It didn't matter if it WAS your favorite song playing on KLEO radio out of Wichita.  We were taught to respect and show honor always to the dead with no questions asked.  The Scott siblings were taught to respect life and the living and to show equal reverence to the deceased.  I thank my parents for that which they taught me at an early age.  I still know it and practice this day.

The weather here in Kansas has been rather gloomy with little sunshine and lots of much needed moisture coming down.  Word from Mike back home in Montrose is that it is rainy there as well.  I will begin the long journey back home to Colorado on Friday late of this week and with luck shall make it back safe and sound.  I'm soaking in all of Kansas that I can and storing a treasure of memories that will last me for the next months to come.  It was wonderful to attend worship services  this morning at my old church here, Our Redeemer Lutheran, and to greet  so many good friends that I haven't seen in a long time.  I've been Lutheran for the past 42 years and I guess I don't see myself changing that in the future, whether I live here or in Colorado.  I'm grateful for the faith that I have and thankful that there is a God who knows my very presence, my whereabouts always.  He'll see me back over the big mountain later on this week and whether I am on the Atlantic or the Pacific side of the Continental Divide, I'm ok.  I'm always in good hands as I make passage back and forth between here and there. His hands. 

Time to get busy and start this Sunday as I try to finish up what needs to be done here in Hutchinson, Kansas.  Back home, 611 miles to the south west there is a guy named Mike Renfro who is anxious for me to get back there again.  In as much as I love you KANSAS and always will, I'm ready to go home to Colorado and begin life again there.  Come the Christmas season, I'll return once again.  Have a great day everyone out there and take care.  Be at peace with your lives and with one another.  Life is just way too short to live it  any other way.

Honoring the memory of my great-great grandmother, Rebecca Burch at the Fairview Quaker Cemetery.

She will be my next-door neighbor when my time comes to leave this place called Earth.
We lived a hundred years apart but through the stories I have heard of her since I was able to listen to them, I feel like I know her any ways.