Memorial Day Weekend

 

 Do you have memories of Memorial Day? Today, I think it's treated as just another holiday. Maybe not on the East Coast but here in California it is. As a child though, my Mom would have people save tin cans and they would bring to our house, which she cleaned and they would sit on the back porch until Memorial Day weekend, which she called "decoration day." We lived in a very old farmhouse then. On a property filled with every kind of flower and tree you can imagine. Then she would begin collecting flowers and greenery and she would assemble all of these cans and then we would all go to the cemeteries and she would visit everyone who had gone on ahead. I remember when it dawned on me, there are dead people buried under my feet. Kind of a shock when you are four.

So I woke up thinking about that this morning. This is my grandfathers place of sleep. He maybe had the worst job in the world, in W.W. ll His job was to land on islands in the South Pacific and "clean up." Every island of combatants. He was also at the Battle of Manila. He was changed forever by what he experienced in battle.

 

He never told me stories like he did my brother. I really never knew much about it because he was from that school of women were the weaker vessel and he didn't think it was something a woman should ever hear. I wish he had told me a little bit.

 

I don't know if you can read this but it says at the top of the picture Henry and Maude Ethyl Sexton on their wedding day in 1902. That was my grandpa's parents. So much hope in their young faces. I love that picture of Maude. I never met her even though she was alive when I was a kid. 

 

How did they get from the happy excited place they were in 1909 to here. I always think about that.

These were the five youngest children. The older ones were already married. I think there were 13 children. Part of the farmers, I see in my head as I hook my rug. 

 

He became a farmer too. When we drive to North Carolina we always drive by his land in New Mexico.

See that tree in the background? Its still there. That is the marker I use to see his land from the road. Now it belongs to another family. I think about him every time I pass and remember what it was like to sit on his screened porch and listen to his stories. 

As I hook, and remember, its a story, I didn't know I wanted to tell. I think about it when I am sitting in my sewing chair, remembering and thinking of all of those people who came before that made me. Someday, perhaps, my grand children will tell or write funny stories about what they remember of me. I can just hear my grand children saying, " Do you think Grandma ever heard a Bigfoot? Do you think she ever saw one? " Because I am afraid that is all they will remember because of the stories I told them.  

I hope your weekend is lovely and full of good things. I have set a goal for myself that this rug will be finished by July and hanging above my mantel. That's the goal. So see how my plans go. 

~Kim~

 " Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.  Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."

Philippians 3:12-14