Peonies In a Jar: The Somber Celebration of Decoration Day

Today is Memorial Day, though the old folks called it Decoration Day. Memorial Day is a big deal now. It’s a three day weekend for many people, and it memorializes fallen soldiers. To hear Madison Avenue tell it, everyone goes to a parade that features a military flyover. After the parade everyone has a cookout with their family. I can’t say how many people really celebrate Memorial Day that way. But I can say for sure that when I was a kid Decoration Day wasn’t like that at all.

In fact, Decoration Day was a day of sorrow, and damn lot of work to boot, at least the way Mom “celebrated” it. It meant traveling around southeastern Iowa, stopping at cemeteries and putting flowers on the graves of our deceased family members. Since a lot of the family was getting on in age, every year there were a few more graves to decorate. But the work involved much more than a day of driving.

You can’t have flowers without a vase to hold them

Mom knew that the groundskeepers at the cemeteries would throw out all the decorations in a few weeks, so they could mow efficiently. So she wasn’t willing to invest any money in vases for the flowers. Instead, she would save up all the wide-mouthed jars from mayo, peanut butter, and so forth, wash them as they were emptied, and soak off the labels. Then she would make me carry them to the basement to store for Decoration Day.

At the start of the long weekend Mom would have me bring up the jars from the basement. We would go out to the alley and scrounge up the biggest chunks of gravel that would fit into the jars. These would serve as ballast so the jars wouldn’t tip over.

Peonies and other flowers

There wasn’t any particularly deep symbolism to using peonies. They simply were the flowers that were usually blooming in Mom’s garden when Decoration Day rolled around. Once in a while we would have a late spring, and the peonies wouldn’t be blooming yet. Then Mom had to get creative. I remember using lilies of the valley, violets, even a few dandelions one time. Whatever was blooming, and free. She never bought flowers.

Saturday morning we would get up bright and early. Mom would go out to the back yard and start cutting flowers. She would put enough in each jar to make a nice arrangement, and fuss over them for a bit. We would add a bit of water to each jar, though we wouldn’t fill them completely until we placed them at the graves.

We would pack the jars of flowers into low boxes to corral them during the drive. Once we filled the back seat floor, we would put the rest in the trunk. We would pack up some jugs of water, a cooler with sandwiches for lunch, and set off gingerly, trying not to spill too much water.

A somber errand

The route varied from year to year. While Grandma was alive, we would go to West Point first, pick her up, and decorate the graves in West Point, then drop her off and head to New London to pay respects to Dad’s family members. When I was little, that was the extent of it. All of the graves we were visiting were people who had died before I was born, so it didn’t mean much to me.

Later, the route got longer, and more and more of the graves were for people I had known and loved. We would load up the Rambler and head to Burlington, to get Aunt Ada and Uncle Heinie’s grave. Then New London, where Dad’s mother was buried, alongside his brother Orville. Then Lowell, where Dad was buried. That was the hardest stop. I always sort of dreaded it, though there was no way I would skip it. I knew it would be emotionally draining for both Mom and I.

After lunch we’d go on to West Point. There were a lot of graves to decorate there. Grandma and Grandpa, of course. And Mom’s little brother Arthur, who had died of whooping cough as a toddler. Then Mom’s grandparents (both sides), and a growing number of Grandma’s and Grandpa’s siblings, and their spouses, Mom’s aunts and uncles. Some of her cousins were there too. Grandma and Grandpa both came from big families, so there were a lot of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and a lot of jars of flowers. And a lot of respects to pay.

Decoration Day Blues

I live a long way from southeastern Iowa now. I can’t get back anymore to decorate the graves, and it doesn’t feel right. But I still remember the people buried there, and I still pay my respects in my heart on every Decoration Day.