09/26/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/19aPuey68d/
The whole county came back for it, the graveyard got scrubbed by hand, three hundred people ate under the trees, and the entire thing ran on the memory of one woman who had never written any of it down. 💐
Decoration Day in these mountains is older than Memorial Day and it is not the same thing. It grew out of families cleaning and decorating their own burying grounds on a set Sunday, usually in May or June, and in a lot of communities it is still the biggest day on the calendar.
The work started days ahead. Women made flowers out of crepe paper and dipped them in wax so a rain would not ruin them, because real flowers in that quantity were not something anybody could buy. Men mowed with scythes. Everybody scrubbed stones. Then on the day, families came down from Ohio and Michigan and Indiana, out of the cities they had moved to for work, and stood in a graveyard on a ridge with people they only saw once a year.
Here is the part that gets missed. In most of those cemeteries a great many graves are unmarked. Fieldstones, or nothing at all. The only record of who was in them lived in the heads of a few older women, and it got handed down the same way a recipe did, by walking the rows and saying the names out loud to a younger person until she had them.
That is not sentiment. That is a records system. A woman standing with her hand on a stone telling a nineteen year old who is buried in the row behind it is doing the work of an entire courthouse, and in a lot of counties she is the only copy of it.
When those women died without anybody standing beside them, whole rows went silent, and there is no getting it back.
So people keep coming. The dinner is enormous, the singing goes on too long, and somebody always walks the children down the rows and starts saying names.
That is what the day is actually for. 🕊️
