Decoration Day

Decoration Day

All of my life I have participated, in one way or another, in the Decoration Day at Fairview West Baptist Church on the 2nd Sunday of May. As a child, I was always there. As an adult, if I was living too far away, I thought of my loved ones and hoped that someone in our family had remembered them in some way. Usually a day or two before the second Sunday, Daddy would go to the Cemetery and remove anything that was growing on our graves (grass, weeds, etc.) and re-mound dirt up the length of each grave, for that was the custom at that time. We didn't have many, only Grandma and Grandpa Barfoot, Aunt Alma and Mama's Grandmother. Mama stayed home cooking pies, cakes and anything else that would allow her to show off her skills as a cook.


 

On Sunday morning, Daddy would hitch Dan and Maude to the wagon and we would all pile in, along with the boxes of food, a jug of sweet tea and fresh cut flowers, in fruit jars filled with water so we could decorate our graves. There was singing, preaching and then dinner on the grounds. Dinner was served on a long table under the trees at the back of the old white church. Brother Harvey Edwards was usually there and was always asked to bless the food. Well, Brother Harvey didn't leave anyone or anything out of his blessing, so we were starving by the time he finished (He was the preacher who married Mama and Daddy). Daddy considered himself an apple pie connoisseur and made sure that he had tasted every apple pie on the table. Then it was back in the church for singing which Daddy loved and me too, as I grew older.
 

A part of the fun of Decoration Day was seeing lots of relatives. Travel was more difficult then and this was the only time we saw some of them. Every year, Mama especially looked forward to seeing her Aunt Gene West (Nettie Eugenia Mason), her mother's only living whole sister. I remember Aunt Gene as a lovely, elegant lady with silver hair pulled back in a bun.

Decoration Day as we know it, is a tradition of the Appalachian South. In the North, people decorate their graves on Memorial Day. Here, each cemetery has it's own day. Three of our graves only had rocks as headstones, awaiting the time when there was enough money to buy real headstones with names. I knew who was buried at each rock for those relatives were important to me. Now, there are many more. My dad bought a plot in the same row with his parents, sister and Uncle Jack (Jackson Fannin).

Then, when my mom died, I became their keeper and replaced the fresh peony and magnolia blossoms with living flowers. The graves are no longer mounded with dirt but are flat and covered with grass. After my dad died, I planted zoysia grass which now covers a large area.



I still go every year just before Decoration Day and pretty up their graves. What I'm really doing is remembering them and telling myself that they still know that I care.