Pretty Pink Peonies

My memories of Memorial Day (originally called Decoration Day), and why it's important to honor those we've lost by decorating graves with flowers and flags

Many Memorial Days when I was a kid, I would accompany my mom and grandma to the little cemeteries that dotted the Ozark countryside, the trunk of our car filled with miniature American flags, boxes of Kleenex and a slew of fresh flowers from my grandma’s gardens.

While Memorial Day typically marked the end of school and beginning of summer vacation, our family would delay our departure to our log cabin on Sugar Creek until all of our “family visits” had been completed.

My grandma and mom would hit as many cemeteries as possible on Memorial Day with a great sense of purpose and a definitive agenda, like holiday shoppers the Friday after Thanksgiving.

My mom would slowly pull our car down the cemeteries’ long dirt or gravel driveways and bicker with my grandma about who was buried where — my mom pointing this way, my grandma the other — until my mom would park the car, and we would each grab a handful of fresh flowers wrapped in wet paper towels, tiny flags and Kleenex.

Ozark cemeteries were not lush, lavish, or large. Graveyards, as we called them, were usually compact and often rested on a rolling foothill or quiet piece of country land next to a pastoral pasture. They were not filled with enormous marble headstones. There were no mausoleums. They did not sit on breathtaking cliffs overlooking the crashing waves of an ocean.

The weather always varied greatly on Memorial Day. Some days were hot and stifling, portending a humid, windless summer where the unified cry of the crickets could almost make a man go nuts. And others were wet and cool, a gentle rain softening the earth, chilling our bones, turning the green grass on the graves even greener.

But the weather never deterred my mom or grandma. They made their way in sensible, respectful heels over mounds and mole hills, in the rain or sweltering heat, wending their way among the graves, their arms interlocked, purses notched in their elbows, their heels often getting mired in the mud, me following to wipe them clean with Kleenex originally meant for mascara-strewn eyes and cheeks.

My mom and grandma would seek out sisters and brothers, cousins and nephews, friends and neighbors, soldiers and war vets who had passed before them or in service to our country, the two of them sharing stories about the dead and what each had meant to them.

My grandma and my mom

It was while standing in these graveyards that I got to know many of those family members I never had a chance to meet. Sometimes, my mom and grandma would laugh, sometimes they would cry, but they always ended with the same ritual: My mother and grandmother would kneel to say a prayer, pay their respects and then plant peonies and American flags into the earth over the grave.

“See you next year,” they would whisper, passing a kiss from their hand to the earth before standing again, interlocking arms, and slowly making their way to the next party guest.

But when I was fourteen, a litany of death strangled my family in short order like a swarm of locusts — starting with my brother, Todd, who was killed in an accident weeks after he had graduated from high school and weeks before I was to start my freshman year.

His death was followed by those of my aunt and my grampa, and it was then that our Memorial Days began to change. We simply headed to our cabin, taking a circuitous route that bypassed all the local cemeteries, a task — I now realize — must have taken a great deal of forethought.

As I aged, I didn’t consider Memorial Day much beyond the fact that it gave me a three-day weekend and kickstart to summer.

And then I met Gary, who was an avid gardener just like my grandma.

I always admired those who tended the earth, and when I saw Gary in work in our garden, I saw my grandma, too. I also secretly believed that if Gary could cultivate seeds in a dead patch of earth, he could surely nurture me back to life.

One scorching summer day, around the anniversary of my brother’s death, my parents drove to Michigan for a visit. It had not been an easy one for any of us, as — even three decades later — I found myself constantly preoccupied with what my parents were still missing: My dead brother, his imaginary wife, the ghost grandchildren they would never hold.

As Gary was giving my mother a tour of our cottage garden — literally acres of gardens — my mother suddenly fell to her knees and started crying, convulsing really. When I looked down to see if she was okay, she was holding a peony to her face. That’s when it hit me.

“Smell,” my mother said.

Gary plucked a white peony with a pink center from our garden, and I held it before my nose. The memories came flooding back.

My grandmother used to grow long rows of peonies on the back side of her Ozark home, a spot where the sun would bake them much of the day. She rotated bushes of white and pink, and the flowers would grow so heavy that they simply exhausted the stems that valiantly tried to support them. Eventually her peonies would just flop on the ground like a tired, old dog, thick powder puff blooms of soft pink and virginal white.

What I remember most was the flowers’ fragrance, which would hang in the air like a cloud of perfume. For a few precious days — before a thunderstorm arrived, and the rain would knock off all the petals — I would rejoice in the peonies’ thick smell, a fragrance so rich and deep, in fact, that it would scent the bedsheets that flapped on the clothesline overhead.

When I would stay at my grandma’s house, she would tuck me in every night and we’d recite “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” I would nestle into a pile of line-dried sheets, and my grandma would whisper, “This is what heaven will smell like. Peonies!”

And it was then I remembered she not only hung her clothesline over her peonies so I would go to sleep in the sweetest scent in the world but also that she intentionally planted two types of peonies, early and late blooming. The early-blooming peonies were planted for one reason only: So she could decorate the graves of her family and friends on Memorial Day with not just real flowers but with flowers she considered to be the most beautiful in the world.

My mother looked at me and smiled, a tear trailing down her cheek.

My mother had transplanted the peonies my grandmother grew and loved to her garden after her mom had died. She had then given starts to Gary, and — for the first time — they had bloomed in our garden.

Today.

The next Memorial Day, we surprised my parents by driving eleven hours to visit them in the Ozarks. Out of the blue the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, just after we had finished eating dollar-sized pancakes with strawberry syrup, I asked my mother if she wanted to decorate graves.

Her tears told me she did.

She appeared moments later wearing a dress and a pair of respectful, sensible heels.

“We’ll need to pick up a few things on the way,” she said as we headed to my car.

I shook my head, popping the trunk, which I had already filled with miniature flags, a box of Kleenex and, most importantly, peonies — in a cooler, wrapped in wet paper towels — that had been born in my grandma’s garden, passed to my mother and then forwarded to us like precious, fragile cargo.

“I picked some from your garden on our way down here,” I said.

We stopped at my brother’s grave first, and then my grandmother’s, where we told stories, we wept and we hugged.

I knelt on my grandmother’s grave that Memorial Day, my knees on the cool earth, and planted a flag and then said a prayer: A prayer that after I am long gone someone takes the time to share my story, to visit me on occasion, and to pass along my legacy.

And then I scraped my hands into the wet earth, digging through new grass and mud and red clay, and I planted some peonies.

P.S. Yesterday, in advance of posting this essay, a friend from high school messaged me to let me know that she had visited the cemetery where my family — grandparents, parents, brother, aunt — are buried and had decorated their graves with flowers. I wept at her thoughtfulness and felt as if my message had been carried on the wind back to the Ozarks this weekend. Thank you, Patti! XOXO!