At least once a year my family tries to come down to the area our great grandparents farms were and visit the old land and graveyards. It used to always be something we did with my grandmother on Memorial Day and also if our relatives from northern states came down to visit at another time in the year.
I remember doing this as a kid, and I'm a strange one who actually likes going to the places of the dead. I used to freak people out because I would run off and they would find me later, content as could be having a tea party by a grave on the other side of the cemetery. It was funny when it happened to be a relative's grave from a few generations back.
Now that Grandmother is no longer with us to drive us down to the correct places, but lays instead with them in the cemetery, we don't always make it that once a year.
"You wait in the car on the side of the road
Let me go and stand awhile
I wanna know you're there but I wanna be alone
If only for a minute or two
I wanna see what it feels like to be without you" -Lucinda Williams
This year we did get to all go on Memorial Day, and when I was planning I told my husband we needed to drive out there on his 3 day weekend. He mentioned it(with the attitude of "Who wants to go do something so depressing on a holiday? I just want to eat BBQ!") to his coworkers and they were all like "Oh yeah, it is that time of year again" because they all remember and he never does.
It's cute. Not infuriating. Not at all.
I think he's only joking, but the joke does get old. And judging by his lack of history knowledge and insults to other state holidays he gets to take off... yeah I'm not so sure it is joking. A girl can hope though!
Anyway, I wound up just riding with my family and letting him stay home to play his games. We went to eat lunch at a place I found last year, did our usual two sites, then wanted to try going to find an old small graveyard that my mother remembered her mom going to, but that she had stopped driving all that way.
We kept driving and driving down the country roads, and not finding it. As we were going down a dead ender, I kept being drawn to all of the wildflowers on the side of the road. And some horses, I really wanted to get out and take pictures. I had the feeling we weren't going to find the place, and my mother was realizing there might be a reason they had stopped going to it those years before.
But we went almost to the end of that dead end, turned on a little trail road until it was too much to drive through anymore. There was a field full of corn on one side, and everywhere else was just overgrown. I got out to walk up through the mud to talk with my aunts and say we all gave up on finding it.
I also told them about all of the flowers back the way we came, and they wanted to take pictures too. So on the way out we did that, then I got to say my goodbyes as they headed back north.
Though the name plates and stones are no longer to be found(and I may not even know their actual names, except for hearing them in a story or two through the years) I know they're out there somewhere.
These flowers are their memorial now. I send my feelings and thanks out to those who came before me, and trust in the wind to take it wherever it needs to be. Could they be in those fields covered over and lost, or growing with food now? Who could know for sure, but I have faith that they knew they were loved and appreciated and are at peace anyway.
"I walked out into a field the grass was high
it brushed against my legs
I just stood and looked out at the open space
and a farmhouse out a ways
and I wondered about the people who lived in it
and I wondered if they were happy and content"
-Lucinda Williams
Thanks for reading! Pictures are mine, logo gifted by Papa Pepper.