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Cuzzin Ricky, TVI and I resumed the Dead Relatives tour Monday as we normally do on Memorial Day. The cemetery where our fathers are buried usually has American flags by all the veteran's graves. Not so this year. There's a small veteran's area across the road from my dad's plot that has headstones from veterans mostly from both of the world wars and they had flags and there were a few others that had flags but not like it has been in the past.
The other cemetery where my mom, their uncle and a couple of my old neighbors are buried had flags out, at least on the graves that had military markers. The neighbor who lived across the street from me when I was growing up was a few years younger than my dad but was old enough to have been in WWII. Like most of those guys from back then, they didn't talk much about their service, so I never knew if he was a veteran or not. Ancestry.com had free access to military records over the weekend so I looked him up and I did find a record of him having been in the service. I'm going to have to go to the cemetery and see what it would take to get him on the list for a flag next year.
While Memorial Day is for remembering the war dead. there's only one grave we decorate that is actually that of a serviceman who died in WWII. Neither Rick or I had any idea who the guy was but his grave is between my dad's and our grandparent's graves, so we "adopted" him a few years back. And like the rest of the graves we clean up and plant flowers at, it's nice they're dressed up a bit for the summer. No point in waiting until Veterans Day to plant flowers around here - liable to be snowing.
Glad the cooties didn't keep us away again this year. All that I've become, either good or bad, is because of those we visited Monday. I owe them all and I'll never be able to repay them by just planting some flowers but I'll never forget them.
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