When my dad’s last of three sisters, my dear Aunt Doris, died in 2007 I promised to visit the Fulton cemetery yearly. I was the last link in Fulton. She would be buried next to her two sisters and spouses and her devoted husband in Battle Creek Memorial Park. Atop the lonely hill near Fulton, surrounded by Michigan cornfields, the graves of my grandparents and their two sons, one an infant, one a war hero, would rest alone.
Before my Aunt Doris died my Memorial Weekend visits turned up sporadic, but now…I promised. And it’s not just the Fulton cemetery. My husband, Tim, and I visit my Uncle Bob at Ft. Custer National Cemetery…with American flags standing straight and tall on every site, and sections filling up rapidly with dying veterans. At the huge beautiful Memorial Park cemetery I used to explore on bicycles with Rosie, we visit “the aunts,” my mother and wonderful step-father, and assorted relatives. And after Fulton it’s on to Athens, another small village where my mother grew up and my maternal grandparents are buried. We call it the Cemetery Run.
I organize The Cemetery Run like the well thought out lesson plans of my teaching days. I tenderly plant blazing red geraniums in a dozen pots, remembering each loved one as I write their name on the bottom. I place each pot in the back of the van in sequence of visited cemeteries on the route. I clutch a folder full of directions and maps because we always seem to lose our way in the multiple sections of Memorial Park and the back roads between Fulton and Athens, causing me to admire my Grandpa Martens even more who drove those roads every day on his rural postal route.
My Aunt Francie, my mother’s youngest sister, joined us this year and when she found the Memorial Park gravesite by accident of her husband’s best friend, she entertained us with stories of how my Uncle Bob and his buddy, Harold, were always getting into mischief. When caught shooting beebee guns at birds, Harold’s mother made them kill flies for the rest of the day. Harold was a medaled Marine dying in the Pacific in 1944.
Driving on to Ft. Custer Cemetery, Aunt Francie recalled the summer of 1948. “Everyone was getting married.” The guys who did come home from the war were finding waiting girl friends like my Aunt Francie or my cousin, Mary; or newly widowed women, like my mom who married my step father, home from the Pacific. His brother also married a war widow that summer.
At the entrance to Ft. Custer, I pulled out my camera. The entrance boulevard is framed in what seems like hundreds of ten foot flagpoles just feet apart. Crisp, fresh flags fly forever free. Like my lesson plans I always wrote in pencil to accommodate last minute changes, we encountered the first glitch in this year’s Cemetery Run. The Memorial Day Ceremony was taking place when we turned onto the boulevard of flags and too many cars marred any visible photo opportunity. We also needed to drive unplanned miles to a back entrance, thoroughly messing up my Mapquest route to Fulton!
But visiting Uncle Bob, nestled with all those other war veterans was worth it. Aunt Francie told of the tradition of many of her grandchildren and their children helping to place the flags on each grave the day before. How the little ones would dodge care freely between the flags, but remain solemn when their parents stood and recalled stories of their Granddad.
At least in Fulton, I rationalized, I could get some planned for pictures of the clean gravestones! Dark black with algae and grunge, the names on the graves had been barely visible the year before. After web research and trips to a camera store for the Internet mentioned Photo Flo, Tim and I felt we could clean those graves to a sparkly almost new appearance. We did with loud booming thunder keeping time to our scrubbing strokes. The grime disappeared but the storm did not. Just making it to the van, huge drops pelted my Cemetery Run folder and me! No picture here.
Wind gusts whipped the rain sideways as we drove slowly into Fulton, needing to make a quick traditional drive down Artmartin Street. By now the wind was blowing signs sideways while leaves and branches bombarded the window shield. Just pass the four corners of Fulton we decided to stop near the front of the church where I was baptized and my dad’s memorial service was held. Observing the chaos of whipping rain, tumbling branches and limbs and dangling power lines, the three of us knew this was no ordinary thunderstorm. (We later heard winds were clocked at 80 mph right in the vicinity where we parked.)
Finally the wind abated and we inched forward through the subsiding raindrops. But it was very slow going on those country roads outlined by sheared branches and uprooted trees, their root systems pulled totally from the ground, covered in mounds of dirt taller than us. At one point we stopped to ask a man standing in shock on his front porch if he was okay. A massive pine once soaring above his two story farmhouse lay fallen between house and barn, cutting off any visibility between the two.
It seemed each gravel road we tried had more downed trees or power lines than the previous. We kept turning around, turning back. We gave up getting to Athens, but then we spent the next two hours just getting back to Battle Creek. Even the interstate was slowed and stopped. Schedules and routes abandoned, like erasures and arrows on my lesson plans, we said prayers for safety and the dazed people we encountered standing in roads and on porches. The memories of loved ones still embraced and enriched us whether they received their geranium or not. And God still was with us as He so artfully reminded us on one of the pictures I did manage to take:
