A long hello from Missouri

I arrived safe, sound, and un-slapped or otherwise punished or constrained by flight attendants. This was a bumpy flight with all of the thunderstorms between Los Angeles and Springfield, MO, but I've been on bumpier ones. I survived. I just about rubbed the wings off of Pam's doll she made me, but I got here fine.

My dad looks great, so much better than how I left him after the last surgery. That has made me feel better about this one. He looks strong and determined. My brother gets here tomorrow and Thursday we will be moving from Mountain Grove, where my Dad and his wife, Neva, live to Springfield about 65 miles away. I'll be staying with Neva in a motel near the hospital at night and in the hospital all day everyday the week or so my dad is there.

Yesterday I got to do something I hadn't done in years. When I was little and growing up in the Midwest, school got out before Memorial Day and started again after Labor Day - nice long summers. Now my kids go to school until late June and go back in late August. Anyway, when I was little we would come here to Mountain Grove to visit my grandparents and spend our 2 week family vacation in the Ozarks. We were almost always here for Memorial Day. Little temporary stores would pop up just for the purpose of selling silk flowers for folks to buy for Memorial Day. My mom, grandmother, and I would carefully choose dozens and dozens of flower bunches, pack up a picnic lunch, and the whole family would set off to visit all of the country cemeteries where my ancestors were buried. These are country cemeteries, on little bitty old country roads next to little bitty old country churches and one room school houses of long ago.

It was always a fun day. My dad would drive fast over the hills and curves of those little bitty old country roads and our tummies would drop like we were on a roller coaster. We'd giggle and my mom would scold my dad for driving too fast. We'd tour the old cemeteries a bit, plunk in the ground the new fresh flowers, if silk flowers can be considered fresh, and talk about who was who and how they died and how they lived. I loved those stories. I loved reading all the old fashioned names on the headstones. Since I didn't know most of the people, as they had died long before I came along, I imagined their lives as I looked at the dates on their headstones and saw them as romantic movies in my head . . . some tragic, some boring (based on their names, of course), some heroically long and exemplary for surviving the hardships of life before electricity and TV and fast food. As an adult, I have a hard time sifting through what may be stories I made up in my head about those people whose headstones I carefully inspected and what I was told and what of what I was told was true or embellished.

This year, it was a quicker trip. My mom and grandparents are long gone. My dad had already bought the flowers and it was decided half heartedly not to visit one of the cemeteries of my grandfather's family as it has somehow lost its importance to visit over the years - it's further away and the family more distant now. We didn't pack a lunch. We ate fast food. I drove and I don't think I drove quite fast enough that anyone lost their tummies on the little bitty old country roads. This time instead of remembering the people, it was more remembering the Memorial Day trips of years past. But it was good. Had I been alone or had the luxury of more time, I could have easily come up with a few romantic or tragic or heroic stories again. It was not the day, not the mood.

I did find this unusual headstone for which I am imagining all kinds of stories. It does not mark the place of any relation of mine but it is near my father's parents' graves in Koshkonong, MO. Right next to it was a headstone for two men with the last name of Johnson and just below their names and dates it read "Real Brothers" which I found interesting as well. There is no date on this stone and nothing on the other side. It appears to read John H Johnson with many letters backwards.



We toured the great metropolis of Koshkonong which took all of a few minutes. It was just so cool to hear my dad tell a few little stories of places we drove by, like the rock wall that still stands outside an old stone church where he sat and watched military vehicles drive by as men went off to war at the start of WWII, and to see the old battered store front of the general store where he worked at the ripe age of 8 stacking potatoes and delivering groceries in his wagon, and to see his childhood home where he lived with his mother and grandparents after his father died when he was 7, to hear about the peach orchards that grew between the houses and how his grandfather worked on the railroad right there by his house. That was the gift of yesterday and the things I hold so dearly about my occasional trips here and the ingredients for all of the stories I can imagine about the people whose names are still whispered to the soft summer winds on Memorial Day trips.

I am not a photographer and only brought my cheap little "purse camera" but I wanted to try and show you the brilliant color of the cemeteries and the new flowers placed over the weekend.





I haven't checked email or blogs and will try to in the next couple of days. My schedule is not my own here and there is lots of visiting to catch up on as well as the need to get the chores caught up so that all is well over the next couple of weeks around here. I miss you all! I thank you for your good thoughts and prayers that brought me safely here!