Red Room Where the Writers Are

 My 8th and 9th graders have to write a 350 "essay" on this topic.  One of my classes asked, "Ms. Hooker, are you going to write this essay?"  So, here's mine.

 WHAT MEMORIAL DAY MEANS TO ME . . .

I’m the product of Mormon immigrants.  My parents settled within ten minutes of the homes in which they were raised.

Growing up, my Memorial Days were spent in the backseat of my dad’s 1967 brown Cadillac Fleetwood. 

In the morning, I helped my gray-haired mother (she turned gray the minute she adopted me) snip lilies of the valley and purple lilacs in our yard.  Then, she’d put them in cans and milk jugs.  After laying down newspaper to make sure we didn’t dirty the trunk, we loaded the flowers.

Then, we drove to Nana and Grandpa’s house just off of 13th East.  They’d been up for hours clipping roses.  Those were loaded and the caravan began. 

In their beige Buick Riviera, Nana and Grandpa followed us to Grandma and Grandpa’s house in South Salt Lake City where we collected burgundy peonies and snowballs. 

With trunks filled with flowers, jars, rags for cleaning gravestones, and wire clothes hangers (my mother bent them to hook onto the tops of the flower jars and pounded them into the ground to keep them from tipping over at the cemeteries) we drove to the Sandy City Cemetery to decorate my great grandparents’ graves, the Sandstroms. 

Then, we drove out to Herriman to visit the Bowen gravesites.  My grandmother’s father was sent by Brigham Young to “colonize” the area.  In her journal, my great-grandmother wrote of her heartbreak when her husband informed her he was supposed to marry her sister. 

Finally, our cemetery caravan reached the Salt Lake City cemetery where we went from plot to plot decorating the graves of great aunts, uncles and grandparents.

At each grave, regardless of the relation, my mother scrubbed bird droppings from the headstones and, with great care, placed bouquets of flowers.

In March of 1989, my dad died.  That Memorial Day, my uncle, a veteran of WW II made sure a flag was placed on his grave.  My dad served in the Korean War.  It was then that I began to see that Memorial Day was a time to remember my ancestors, celebrate my family and honor veterans.  (350 words)