Decoration day in Jasper, NY

Nestled deep in the hills of New York State’s Finger Lake region are the tiny 200- and 300-year-old villages. The landscape is decorated with modest white, wooden churches with tall, thin steeples reaching to Heaven. The steeples shelter a single bell that rings the faithful to worship. Behind or beside most churches are quiet, tree-covered, grassy plots for family burials.
In that region the first guaranteed, warm holiday each year is Memorial Day. With the threat of frost finally over, mountains of snows melted and the roads clear of packed ice, many families set aside the weekend to visit family graves to plant flowers. Growing up in the area, I heard Memorial Day interchangeable referred to as Decoration Day.
In the town where my family lived, (Jasper, NY) Decoration Day activities were lead by the town’s school band. Every spring they donned their maroon and gold uniforms, marched across the school’s parking lot, up the hill behind the Presbyterian church to the cemetery. Standing in straight lines in that tiny cemetery they played to honor those who once fought for their country. Local war veterans decorated the grave of those who once served their country with American flags.
I began participating in Decoration Day the year after my grandfather died. My mother took grandma to his gravel with a trowel and a pot of flowers. As they planted I studied the ancient headstones in the deeply shaded cemetery. A gravel drive overgrown with grass made one loop through the graveyard.
Did not realize how many other similar church cemeteries were hidden in that rural area until as an adult I asked my mother about her personal history. She decided to show me the memorable sites of her childhood. As we made our way up tree-covered hills and down into the valleys of green meadows, hills and down into the valleys of green meadows, she also pointed out one cemetery after another where an aunt, an uncle or great-grandparent was buried. Vaguely, only vaguely I remembered visiting those cemeteries as a child and teenager. She told me my grandfather’s mother died when he was an infant. He grew up under the care of a stepmother who loved him as her own before she died. His second stepmother was not as accepting, so he spent a lot of time with his first set of step-grandparents. As she filled in my family history she pointed out where each lived and the cemeteries where they now lie. Not so many years later two weeks after Decoration Day, my mother was laid to rest in a starkly new section of a village cemetery.
Southern Arkansas is a long ways from New York and my family. After 20 years I had forgotten about Decoration Day until the year my father came to Arkansas and considered making it his home. Near the end of May he began thinking about her. He called and asked my New York sister to make sure Mom’s grave had flowers. Knowing he wouldn’t be there to tend the flowers or the grave, he also made arrangement to pay a gardening friend to visit her plot.
Over the years I have missed many springs of hearing the high school band play in the village cemetery. But that is OK, as the taps re played on Memorial Day, I will take a walked down memory lane and be there.