Down a country lane!
Most Memorial Day weekends we take off in our car and visit the graves of some of our ancestors following a tradition that probably dates back for generations before us. It is a primeval sort of wanderlust into the past as we honor those who have gone on before us with our so brief presence at their graves. We know, as a Christian, that their souls are not there at the grave sites but it still brings forth memories inside us to visit these quiet places once a year.
Perhaps the quietest place that we frequent is the cemetery that houses the graves of those who died on my mother’s side of the family. My mother is not buried there as she is at the cemetery in Vienna with my father. Mom was an independent sort of lady and she did not follow the tradition that has accompanied her father and her mother even unto death. My mothers father had ten children of his own and adopted or took in practically every orphan in the Flatwoods area where he and my grandmother spend practically their entire lives on their over one hundred acre farmstead. It was a big farm for its time as it was not all that far removed in time from the first settlers who worked those forty acre tracts that they could homestead from the government that the neoconservatives hate so much these days. My grandfather was a God fearing man who could quote the Bible from beginning to end from memory as he could do nothing more than write his name. Grandmother did all of his reading for him and she was quite literate for her time. When she died she passed on to me a large scrapbook of clipping of poetry and the sort that she had collected over a lifetime.
Last Friday, the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend, we buried a relative out in the isolated cemetery down a leaf surrounded country lane not far from the County Line Baptist Church where generations of country folk have worshiped since before the American Civil War. The funeral procession that we were a part of wound its way from Vienna to the east past the modern interstate highway system back into the past that ended at this very quiet cemetery at the end of that country lane that, at its end, was nothing more than a dusty gravel road. They have expanded this still active cemetery from its original confines that had once made it seem like a lifeboat among the woods at one time when we were a youth. As others visited among themselves after the brief graveside service, we chose instead to explore parts of the cemetery that we had never seen before. The stones reflected the times and the economic status of those who lie beneath them and some were unreadable to the unaided eye. Still others reflected economic prosperity and some were ended dated before the Civil War began. Still others reflected service in that conflict. In the more recent parts of the cemetery there are government purchased bronze plates at the foot of some graves reflecting service during the second world war and in Korea or Vietnam. These people were proud of what they had done in true service to their country in its time of great need and they reflect the true backbone that this country still needs today.
We are still astounded that our mother and father did not choose to be buried here in this quiet place that people from all over the United States and the state of Illinois have decided to call their final resting place. My grandfather has attracted over half of his ten children to reside with him at eternal peace even though they could have chosen fine cemeteries in the Chicago area or in Oklahoma or a half a dozen other places that they had resided for most of their adult lives as they followed the eternal migration from economically backward southern Illinois to places of more prosperity. The soul that we laid to rest Friday came all the way back from Portland, Oregon to be buried beside a husband that she had been divorced from for over fifty years, such was the attraction of the only marriage she had ever had and the only family that she had ever known.
We suppose that death makes a statement and where your bones reside makes one equally as compelling.
We remember the stage play “Our Town” and its stark stage scenes of those who have departed sitting beside their imaginary tombstones as they discuss those who are about to join them and we can see for ourselves in our minds eye that going on out at this simple country cemetery. It was such a compelling place Friday that people who had not eaten in six or seven hours lingered by the grave of the one who had just departed from them as they seemed not to want to leave the seeming safety and comfort of the place and the visions of the simple country couple who had been the basis for it all. It is such a complicated world sometimes and finding, if only for a little while, some simplicity and serenity can do wonders for the soul.
So, we will not make our traditional pilgrimage that always ended in this quiet place this Memorial Day because we did so much more than that Friday. We had gone back in time once again and discovered once more that the future still beckons us forward until we too will join the rest down that simple country lane.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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