It’s time to place the potted geraniums on the three graves I decorate. The day is overcast, so (I hope) the plants will do fine till I pick them up tomorrow afternoon or Tuesday. I’ll give them a good drenching at the graves.
It’s time to place the potted geraniums on the three graves I decorate. The day is overcast, so (I hope) the plants will do fine till I pick them up tomorrow afternoon or Tuesday. I’ll give them a good drenching at the graves.
Beautiful flowers.
Live flowers always work best, I think.
So pretty.
My son and I went up yesterday and repotted an replanted, cleaned and trimmed.
Today and tomorrow will be the busiest so we went yesterday where we had space and time to park and not have to walk up the hill.
Have a peaceful and calm rest of the week end.
I went yesterday to avoid the crowd, too. If there isn’t rain, the American Legion puts out circa 200 flags (donated by families – these are coffin flags….) along the central lane to a memorial in the center of the cemetery where a short ceremony for the war dead is held each year.
It’s very emotional driving or walking down that lane, knowing where those flags came from. Pretty, too, since there is a canopy of mature trees lining that lane, and the effect is like a cathedral (to me).
A town up the road 20 miles has a similar display on their main street that is equally impressive for the same reason, though I think the cemetery display in my town has more poignancy because many of those flags covered coffins now interred in that same cemetery.
A military cemetery opened a couple years ago here, and more and more veterans and families are being buried there instead. I think I will be buried there, too.
There’s also a ceremony there, as you might expect and another at the county courthouse, where a memorial with the US flag and the flags of the services are flown daily.
There used to be memorial there with the names of war dead on tiny plates, but, well, too many wars, not enough room or something. it got kind of ratty by the end.
The new memorial with the service flags and US flags is generic enough to be all-inclusive, but specific enough to get the point across: we honor our service people here, whether they died in service or served with honor.
I plan on spending some part of the day (however long it takes) to read through all of the pacificparatrooper blog posts ( http://pacificparatrooper.wordpress.com/ ), something I started yesterday. Then, I’ll go to Pierre Lagace’s blogs for further posts on war. Pierre’s created many blogs (14 I think) that document different Canadian air and navy units, and they are equally worth the time as GP Cox’s pacificparatrooper.