I've been thinking about Memorial Days from my childhood in the 1950s: on the day before, my mother and her sisters ravaging the peonies growing outside our dining room and kitchen windows and filling urns with them and other flowers from their gardens. In the morning, the Memorial Day parade down Main Street - my Uncle Paul was always on the American Legion float - followed by a long day at Woodside Cemetery where my mother and father, her sisters and their spouses decorated the graves of my grandparents and other deceased family members while my cousins, brothers, and I were either in the way, bored out of our minds, or running wild among the graves. It also meant there was another week of school and exams before the summer freed us.
It all seems another time, another life, and another world.
