While Memorial Day is first and foremost a holiday to honor our nation’s war dead and those who fought, it is also a time when many families also honor their deceased relatives.

Drive by most any cemetery and there are colorful flowers on many of the graves, not just flags on the veterans’ graves.

When I was a kid, Memorial Day was a quiet but important family tradition on my mom’s side of the family, the children of the Micah and Sarah James family of Tilden, Nebraska.

Every year around Memorial Day, we would travel from Yankton, S.D. to Norfolk, Neb., pick up my Aunt Neta who didn’t drive and perhaps a few other relatives, make the thirty mile trek west from Norfolk through farm country on US Hwy 275 to Tilden.

Tilden is the home town of Richie Ashburn, the former Philadelphia Phillies great and Hall of Famer, and a contemporary of my mother, Eva Belle, and several of her other sisters.  (More on that in an upcoming entry.)  Tilden is a typical farming community in Nebraska that has seen better days.  However, it is still clinging to much of what made it a great community—a hospital, a swimming pool, a downtown with a drug store, a shoe store, a bank, and a hardware store.

When we arrived at the IOOF Cemetery in the south part of town, we’d slowly drive through the iron gate entrance and park under one of the big shade trees near my grandparents’ grave.  More than just a flower setting exercise, we usually brought spades and buckets and trimmers to make the grave site look as good as possible.  Often, my mom and her sister would plant flowers behind the headstone.  My father, Rodney, the expert amateur gardener, provided the brains for the detail, with me providing most of the brawn.

Until Friday, I had not been to Tilden in at least 30 years, or sometime when I was in high school and before we moved to Kansas in 1976.  My grandmother, Sarah, or Sally as everyone called her, died in 1964 at the relatively young age of 68, when I was 5 years old.

Before leaving Sioux Falls for Columbus via Tilden with my ten year old son Matt, I stopped at a local store and bought two white crosses with artificial flowers attached.  Then we were off.

After an hour or so of touring old haunts around Tilden—my grandmother’s old house, Main Street, the swimming pool, the playground, Richie Ashburn Field, and the beautiful new community library, Matt and I left for the cemetery in the glow of late afternoon.

I found the cemetery with ease.  While there were a few new houses and a couple of new cemetery burial areas, the IOOF Cemetery looked just as it did when I was Matt’s age.  How often does that happen in our lives after thirty years—dusty recollection equalling reality?

I found the big old tree that we used to park my dad’s Ford LTDs underneath.  I grabbed the memorials from the wayback of my Expedition and walked directly to the grave.  Matt, like me when I was his age, kept a safe distance.  Cemeteries are strange and scary places to kids.  So are their parents when they are in a cemetery.

I placed the crosses into the sandy Nebraska soil by the sides of the headstone.  Someone had earlier placed vases of artificial flowers by the stone.  Who, I wondered, had done that?  There aren’t a whole lot of Jameses left.

Memory is a funny thing.  My grandmother died when I was five.  I hardly remember a thing about that time in my life.  But for a few minutes, the memories came flooding back, a warmth in my life that I have not felt in years. 

I remembered sitting at my Granny’s old upright piano and singing silly songs with my grandmother and mother.  I remembered making cars out of old shoe boxes and buttons and thought it was the coolest thing in the world.  I remember going to the old variety store on Main Street with my grandmother and salivating over some new tin toy airplane or car that I hoped Granny would buy me.  I remembered how happy my Granny was when I was around her and how happy I was when she was around me. 

My last memory of Granny James is when my mom and dad went to visit her in the tiny Community Hospital and I had to wait in the car in the parking lot.  The last contact I had with my grandmother was Granny waving her hand to me from her final sick bed.  I had shown Matt the exact spot where I waited in the car, when as a 5 year old I was half glad that I couldn’t go to the scary hospital, but also half sad as well.  Even a five year old senses when things are bad.  Matt politely listened to my intensely personal tale, but I’m sure he didn’t understand—at least not yet.  Someday, hopefully.

Finally, I placed a kiss on Granny’s marker, walked up the grass, got Matt buckled into the Expedition, and returned to my own life and my own family.  A soccer tournament in Columbus, Neb. called.  And hopefully, new memories that both Matt and I would cherish.