Ridge Stories by Jones Gary;

Author:Jones, Gary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society
Published: 2019-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

Memorial Day on Pleasant Ridge

When I die, I reckon I’d as soon be buried on Pleasant Ridge as anywhere. There, a small cemetery flanks an empty tall-steepled white country church. From the kitchen window of the house where I was raised as a boy, we had a distant view of this bucolic setting.

In the older part of the graveyard, white crumbly headstones sit at angles under sleepy pines. Clumps of orange lilies, peonies, and lilacs dot the marker-studded lawn, with an occasional old garden rose scenting the air. Blackberry bushes, black-eyed Susans, and goldenrod stand sentinel along the fence rows that separate the cemetery from the adjoining fields.

My father and two others from the community acted as cemetery trustees, parceling out lots and overseeing the care of the graves. Under their supervision, grass was neatly mowed and trimmed, a part of the perpetual care provision included in the purchase of a cemetery plot.

Every Memorial Day, my mother sent me into the woods and meadows to find wildflowers. Depending on seasonal conditions, I picked wild geraniums and violets, ferns and mayflowers. Our lawn yielded tulips, lilacs, peonies, and mock orange blossoms.

We arranged bouquets in either glass mayonnaise jars that had been washed clean or in orange juice cans that had been de-lidded with a can opener and covered with aluminum foil.

On the car drive to the cemetery, we kids each balanced a bouquet between our feet and held another in our hands. At the graveyard, we added water and then carefully positioned them at the headstones of our relatives, the Grays and the Johnsons, ancestors who had been laid to rest in the clay bosom of the ridge.

On the Sunday before Memorial Day, the church congregation honored the dead formally. All the children in the Sunday school lined up before the altar while the Sunday school superintendent, Sandy Mott, distributed the little flags the town had purchased for that purpose. Sunday school teacher Minnie Williams gave each child a nosegay of garden flowers that the ladies of the church had brought from home.

As Mae Buroker plunked the stirring chords of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” we marched down the aisle, out the door into the sunshine, and filed into the cemetery. We searched out the little wrought iron star flag holders that denoted military veterans, stuck in the flags, and propped the bouquets against the gravestones. Ladies of the congregation, clutching lace-edged hankies, helped the smaller children.

We were unusually quiet as we worked at our task, sensing the solemnity of the occasion. The adults in the congregation watched in near silence. Some of the farmers cleared their throats while a number of women twisted their handkerchiefs. When the last flag and the final bouquet had been stationed at the remaining veteran’s grave, old Reverend Lester Matthews offered up a prayer under the blue May sky while the ridge folk stood with bowed heads.

Many of those parishioners have since passed away and are now buried in the little Pleasant Ridge Cemetery themselves. And few

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