Some people learned how to make the family’s favorite pies from their grandmothers, and some learned the secrets of baking bread. My grandma wasn’t known for her culinary skills; other than her taffy and popcorn balls, nothing stood out as an epicurean experience.
Yet what she lacked in cooking expertise she made up in her views on cemeteries. My cousin called her a “cemetery person,” one of those people who walk around cemeteries checking out tombstones and epitaphs. She frequented a pioneer cemetery east of Greenland in Douglas County, where her family and her husband’s family were buried. In fact, her husband’s father was exhumed from the old Case Cemetery, his coffin placed on a buckboard and transported along dusty roads to Spring Valley Cemetery in 1919.
Grandma didn’t spend a lot of time at that little cemetery. She went there for funerals and, of course, Memorial Day. It was called “Decoration Day” back then. Barbecues, block parties and 10K runs to commemorate the day weren’t popular when Grandma decorated her relatives’ graves. It was a day to honor the departed, and that’s what she did.
It often rained around Memorial Day, and Grandma explained that the rain had a purpose. She believed it was to keep people away from the cemeteries so they wouldn’t step on the graves. She didn’t adhere to the superstition that stepping on a grave resulted in bad luck, but she believed in showing respect to the dead. Just as a person wouldn’t step on a living person, they shouldn’t step on the dead, either, she reasoned.
Memorial Day provided Grandma an opportunity to reconnect with those departed souls who had impacted her life. We’d pack a picnic lunch and head down the highway to the cemetery. We didn’t eat our picnic there. According to Grandma, that would just tempt fate and entice a spirit to join us and follow us home.
She also believed that it was tempting fate to remove anything from the cemetery. What was at the cemetery should stay at the cemetery, she warned us, and that included the dirt and any old decorations. She’d rake the graves and gather those broken canning jars that held last year’s foliage and place them beside the walkway. She wasn’t going to put that stuff in the car and haul it back home. According to Grandma, that was a surefire way to take a spirit home with you.
She carefully planned and prepared the flowers for the graves and never mixed red and white together; that only ensured a death would soon occur.
It always pleased her to see wildflowers growing on the graves of her friends and family members. That signified they had lived a kind-hearted life. Weeds, well, that was another matter. Weeds on graves symbolized the deceased had been a “seedy” person. In that little country cemetery, the graves had both wildflowers and weeds growing on them, but Grandma ignored that. She said no one was perfect.
I once made an unkind comment about a deceased relative, and Grandma reprimanded me, saying the dead take umbrage at such comments and could cause misfortune for you.
I realize that Grandma grew up in a different time, and superstitions were a bigger part of her generation. Yet I learned more from her than that. She taught me the importance of remembering our ancestors and preserving their stories. Still, I’m not taking any chances with that cemetery stuff. I still brush the cemetery dirt off my shoes after each visit, since I don’t want those spirits hitching a ride home with me.
Shirley Terry (cohighcountry@msn.com) lives in Centennial.
