Memorial Day 2016 will be a little different for us. We won’t be attending any program in Lime Springs. Not because we don’t appreciate the effort of the local people and the American Legion in creating a program appropriate for the occasion. And certainly not because we have no interest in remembering the family and friends who have gone before us. We hate to miss seeing friends and to break our several-year record of attendance, but practicality wins on this one.
It’s because we live 120 miles away, it takes about two hours and ten minutes to get there, AND we were just there Saturday!
We visited Pleasant Hill Cemetery. That’s when the above picture of the monuments in memory of my daughter, Amy, and her mother was taken.
Great-grandparents
While there, I also looked up the graves of my great-grandparents, which I had never done before. I knew my great-grandmother Williams was Winifred Williams before she married my great-grandfather, William R. Williams. But I did not know that my Jones great-grandmother was a Jones before her marriage to William O. Jones.
I knew that one of these fellows was nicknamed, in Welsh tradition, “Old Country Bill.” But which one? I think it was the one who never learned English, and I think that was William O. Jones. I’ll have to ask Adel; hopefully she will have the answer.
The Rainbow
Few of you knew Amy, my daughter. I’ll share a bit about her, using her marker as a visual aid.
She is the only person I knew who loved thunderstorms, especially the lightening! I don’t think that has anything to do with rainbows, other than that they often occur at about the same time.
Note that there’s a small graphic in the upper left corner of her stone. Frankly, it’s not a very good graphic. It was intended to be a copy of a cloud and rainbow which she embroidered on a small pillow. (She was extremely good at doing precise and delicate handiwork. She wanted to be an accountant; I bet she would have been a very good one.)
Do you know why rainbows were created? I didn’t! That is one thing I learned from my daughter. She probably learned it from her great Christian friends from Waseca, Karen and Cindy.
Look up the biblical reference given on the marker (Genesis 9:12-16) and you will find, as Paul Harvey would say, “…the rest of the story!”
Possibly you, too, can learn something because of Amy. That would be one way to reflect on the past and those who have gone before us on Memorial Day 2016.