Where have all the flowers gone?

Memorial Day 2009 - Oysterville Cemetery

Memorial Day 2012 – Oysterville Cemetery

There’s something ironic about not having flowers in the garden ready-for-the-picking on this particular weekend of the year.  Today (the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend) is traditionally the day we take flowers to the cemetery.  For the first time in the thirty-eight years I’ve been decorating our family’s graves, we have no flowers in the garden.  None.

Not that they’ve “gone to young girls, every one.”  Not like in Pete Seeger’s lyrics.  They have simply finished their blooming several weeks earlier than usual.  And now we are hard pressed to find anything at all beyond greenery.  And, believe me, our cemetery has plenty of that already.  In fact, it’s the splash of color midst all the evergreens on “Decoration Day” that makes the statement of remembrance special.

I took a walk around the garden yesterday, stewing about the dilemma.  Should we actually go and buy flowers?  It seemed wrong somehow.  Like commercializing the day.  Bad enough that we’ve managed to take spirit out of every other holiday we celebrate.  Somehow, this one day of remembrance should be honored with a little effort and ingenuity – not by throwing money at it.

"That Bush"

“That Bush”

And then my eyes fixed themselves on “that bush.”  We don’t know what it is.  It grows just at the southeast corner of the house.  It’s been there all my life.  I’ve always thought that my grandmother planted it in the 1920s but it could have been planted by Tom Crellin and his wife back in the 1870s.  Or maybe even by a Baptist preacher back when this was the parsonage.  The defining thing about it right this minute is that it’s yellow.  Bright lemony yellow!  The only spot of non-green in our garden.

I’ve been thinking for some time that we really need to trim “that bush.”  What could be better than to arrange the trimmings in our Memorial Day containers and take that bit of sunshine up to the Espy family plot?  So… that’s the plan for this afternoon.  “Gone to graveyards, everyone”…

3 Responses to “Where have all the flowers gone?”

  1. Ruth maloney says:

    It is an old bush called forsythia. I have only seen them in very old gardens like ours on the farm in Puyallup.

  2. sydney says:

    Really? We have quite a few forsythea along the fenceline in the lane and they are yelliow, but otherwise quite different from this one. Maybe a different variety?

  3. Ruth maloney says:

    Could be it is the time of year they are in season. Send me a close up picture

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