Bright Ideas

Monday was Memorial Day, or Decoration Day as it was originally known, meant to honor soldiers lost in the Civil War. But when the country found itself in another war, World War I, the holiday was changed to honor all fallen soldiers. Memorials to soldiers and family graves are decorated with flowers.

Here, early in the morning on Memorial Day, local veterans placed small American flags on the graves of deceased veterans at Beaver Lodge cemetery. At 11 a.m. a special military service was held where VFW and American Legion Auxiliary members placed floral displays on memorials, and the local honor guard brought the cemetery flag to full staff and fired a salute finishing, with the bugle playing Taps.

The cemetery always looks nice, with grass mowed between rains, but then nice changes to beautiful with all the colorful blooms decorating so many graves. Decorations need to be removed after a few days so caretakers can once again use machinery to mow grass around all graves.

My family didn’t realize they had any military veterans to honor, but they did: Reed Perry Debo, my paternal grandmother’s grandfather. He fought for the South in the Civil War, along with brothers and cousins.

Enlisting when he was 31, wounded at Gettysburg, recovering at home and returning to the fight, he became a father before the war was over. His family made the trip west after the war and stopped near Boonville, Missouri, where several generations were raised.

None remain there now. The last was my grandmother who died at 93, in 2002. I have one cousin in Versailles, Missouri, another in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, and an aunt and uncle in Marshall, Missouri. That’s it. Everyone else is dead.

I’m too far away to decorate their graves. My parents and step-father were all buried in Kansas. I was able to attend my brother’s and father’s funerals. My mother and step-father understood my limitations. Now they are all resting in peace, right there in central Kansas.