Memorial Day Alternative

For Me and My Sister, It's About Geraniums

My favorite Memorial Days are ones like this year’s, when bad weather cancels festivities. As a child, I hated marching in the town parade. As an adult, I also hated marching, though I often was compelled to as a parent chaperone for some little league team or school band. As much as I hated marching, though, I vastly preferred it to spectating, because I find parades boring.

I feel like I’m committing kind of patriotic blasphemy here, but I’m just being honest. The visuals are unimpressive, the music horribly amateur, and thus, local parades offer very little in the way of entertainment value. I also don’t like running into people I haven’t seen in a while. I feel like they are looking into my face and desperately struggling to remember my name, just as I’m desperately struggling to remember theirs.

And don’t even get me started on the way I feel about war.

But right now, all of this is a moot point. Today, there won’t be a Memorial Day parade, even if I wanted to go, because of the weather being awful and Covid restrictions, so I’m off the hook. My sister and I are going to do what we’ve done for the past few years: plant geraniums at the graves of my parents, grandparents, great-grandmother and a smattering of great uncles and great aunts. I’m looking forward to it. On Memorial Day, Evergreen Cemetery is a pretty happening place, with folks putting up flags and red, white, and blue paraphernalia on the graves of family members who served in the military. But Suzy and I have our own agenda, free from the national one. No red, white, and blue, because my mother (or maybe it was my grandmother, Suzy and I can never remember) didn’t like red geraniums. We only plant pink ones.

Suzy and I talk about our parents and check out the neighbor’s headstones. Every year we are freshly appalled at the neglect the cemetery has fallen into, and some time is spent picking up litter. But I love that we are passing Memorial Day memorializing. Our ritual aligns with the intention of the national holiday, because we are paying tribute to those who have gone before us and thank them for their sacrifice, but it is way less fraught, since we are honoring people who made us finish our dinners before we got dessert and made it possible for us to go to college. They may not have given their lives for our way of life on a battlefield, but they did so incrementally, intertwining their lives with ours on a daily basis.

War aside, this day is about honoring sacrifice, so Suzy and I are at least in the tribute ballpark. We have pink geraniums and good planting weather. We’ll clear some litter, tell some stories. We may cry a little; in fact, we always do, but then, we consider the sources, and easily make our way to joy.