By JOHN E. WEARE
KAB
Lawnmowers join a neighbor’s barking dog long after birds silence early morning songs on a late spring morning. A nearly perfectly manicured front yard is not the only grass some people care about as May grows warmer. Much smaller plots garner attention when people tend to the final resting places of their loved ones.
Whether downtown parkade flowerbeds or a country cemetery I admire the unseen individuals who work behind the scenes to keep it beautiful. This year, on either side of Memorial Day, I can attest to the latter.
My family and I stopped to visit the graves of my grandparents and great uncle at the Hemingford cemetery on our way to see a play at the Fort Robinson Post Playhouse early afternoon the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. A number of cars parked along the lanes as small groups of people visited and others knelt to place flowers or perhaps a toy in memory of a son taken too soon. I assume employees from the Village were responsible for the freshly cut grass and absence of litter. The grounds continue to reflect pride and respect with recent additions (maybe not new since I last visited a few years ago) such as benches.
Walking down the rows on a rainy, misty day I recounted for my children when their grandpa and uncle had served their country as flags marked each veteran’s grave. A week later I helped gather the same flags at Calvary Cemetery just north of Alliance. The Knights of Columbus place the flags at this Catholic cemetery though I am not sure who is responsible for the same courtesy at Hemingford. At both places I paused here and there to think about the person’s life behind the flag. There were Civil War veterans who served so long ago and people I knew already gone a decade or more.
At Calvary a man asked who took care of the cemetery. I told him. This caretaker, who was in my high school graduating class, has been doing an excellent job for years as his dad did before him. That is among the benefits of serving on a cemetery committee: knowledge of how things run smoothly while having a hand in decisions.
Maybe when I was the age my son is now I remember asking grandpa about a few seemingly random items in the trunk of his maroon Honda Accord – sharp garden shears, a tiny scrub brush and plastic cups with what looked like long nails on the end. He told me about how he cared for his son’s grave at the vast veterans’ cemetery where attention to detail by the grounds crew had been slipping then. I went with him on more than one occasion to place flowers at the base of the white marble stone. Now he is there with my grandma where he knelt to snip uneven grass the trimmer missed. The names of the caretakers there I do not know, yet I hope somebody takes pride in their resting place much too far away to visit on a Memorial Day drive.