Sunday after the second Saturday...

This is my grandpa putting flowers on my grandma's grave for Decoration tomorrow.

I'm not sure why we started early.

If you're not from the Appalachians you may have never heard of Decoration Day. It's what the idea of Memorial Day came from. It warranted its own paragraph in Wikipedia under Memorial Day -

"Annual Decoration Days for particular cemeteries are held on a Sunday in late spring or early summer in some rural areas of the American South, notably in the mountains.
 

In cases involving a family graveyard where remote ancestors as well as those who were deceased more recently are buried, this may take on the character of an extended family reunion to which some people travel hundreds of miles.

People gather on the designated day and put flowers on graves and renew contacts with kinfolk and others.
 
There often is a religious service and a "dinner on the ground," the traditional term for a potluck meal in which people used to spread the dishes out on sheets or tablecloths on the grass.
It is believed that this practice began before the American Civil War and thus may reflect the real origin of the "memorial day" idea." 

This is my great- grandparents grave... I called them Ma and Pa but my Grandma, in true Appalachian fashion, called them Mommy and Daddy her whole life.

Further down this way in the Taylor Family Cemetery are the graves of my great great grandparents and my great great great grandparents.  Tomorrow morning the cemetery will be full of distantly related people we don't know and lots of firsts and second cousins we haven't seen since last Decoration.

This is my first Decoration since Moma's been gone.  Two years ago we all came down here for Decoration and my grandma was so sick - she would only live for another month after that. But she went everywhere with us. She was such a fighter.

I couldn't come the next year,... I had emergency surgery and couldn't get out of bed. 

So I've made trips in between to decorate her grave for the seasons, but this is different.  I've never been to Decoration without her.  What do I do, how do I act without her? This is her thing and I am just a supporting player with no one here to support.

I miss her so much.

Ties, baby

We go to Cumberland Falls every year.  My daughter feels the pull as much as I do, and insists on it.  She'll be 21 in July. !!!.  She was 2 or 3 in this picture, and my grandma had talked us to the edge to get a great shot.

We're Kentuckians, through and through.  Even though I was an Army brat and lived in a lot of different places, it was a relief to come back home.  I'll never want to live anywhere else.  Why would I?  This is the best place in the world.

I blame my grandmother.  She raised all of us to be like this.  I'm not kidding when I say that when I was little, she'd sing me to sleep with a lullaby that began, "Kentucky, you are the dearest land outside of heaven to me...".

I'm a city girl, but I can trace my dirt poor tobacco-farming eastern Kentucky ancestors back to the 1700's.  That's because they're all buried in our family cemetery in Blackwater, KY, where we go every year on Decoration Day.  My grandmother is buried there, and my great-great-great-great-grandmother is buried there. There's still room left for me, too.

We were taught how to handicap the Kentucky Derby by the time we were 5, the basics of country music at 6, and had field tripped the state's major landmarks before age 10.  The UK Wildcats basketball worship training began in the womb.

It's a good thing the brainwashing began early and intense, because it might not have otherwise survived the big 3-year move to Germany.  We didn't get basketball over there, I had to rely on country music cassette mix tapes sent to me via APO mail, the only mountains were the Alps, and the only landmarks were various castles and the Schwarzwald.

I got shipped back home right before I turned 13.  A little culture shock.  But my family!  My trees, my basketball, my Derby, my bluegrass, my mountains, my falls, my Kentucky...

Edit: My mom reminded me exactly how the song goes:

Kentucky, you are the dearest land outside of heaven to me,
Kentucky, I miss your laurel and your redbud trees…
When I die, I want to rest upon your graceful mountains so high..
For that is where God will look for me.

I wanna be there, in my city...

I'm sitting in a hotel room, in Eastern Kentucky, in the foothills of the Appalachians.  This area of the country is so beautiful, I'm proud to be a part of it...
I'm probably not going to have much time to be online for the rest of the weekend.  Hopefully, we'll be out and about, visiting old places, and new ones.  And hopefully my mom and my aunt, who are both ill right now, will be restored by being down here in the place of their birth. 
The trip here today was great fun, as usual.  My SO was grumpy because I grabbed the wrong case of CDs, and so all our main favorites were left at home, in my car.  We had to alternate our listening preferences on the way down with a shortlist of acceptable CDs (my daughter, thankfully, was not there to complain about the music selection, as she opted to drive down with my mom, who has a TV and a VCR in her auto.  All the kids always want to go with my mom, for some reason...).
It took four CDs to get here:
1.  Johnny Cash - American Recordings IV (My pick)
2.  Johnny Cash - American Recordings III (My pick again, I snuck that in when he wasn't looking.  Who can complain about Cash?)
3.  George Jones - Greatest Hits (His pick.  Pain and torture for me!  I mean, yes, the Possum is cool, but try listening to a whole CD of mournful, slow, mournful, slow...I think that CD is going to have to disappear.)
4.  Elvis Presley - Greatest Hits (My pick.  I got an extra turn because of the dud he picked.  But it really wasn't fair, because he refused to listen to my Moulin Rouge soundtrack.  Elvis was his concession.)
I love the incongruity of using my laptop and listening to CDs down here, when tomorrow we're going to go visit my grandma's childhood home, which is deep in the holler...a one-room farmhouse, where she grew up with her parents and her five siblings, and electricity and running water was a thing of the future for them.  The house is now used to store hay!
My family's in a fragile state right now, hopefully things will become more clear down here.  We really need this!

On Family Vacations

My aunt is home from the hospital and things are okay...she had surgery while she was in there, and lots of tests, and still no clear answers.  But she is feeling better, and so we're thankful, and still praying.
We're going down to my mom's (and grandma's and aunt's) hometown down in the mountains of eastern Kentucky this weekend.  For Decoration.  Or, to the kids, for the vacation where the whole family hangs out by the pool for a few days, except on Sunday when we go to the family cemetery in the holler and decorate great-grandparent's and great-great-grandparent's and countless aunts', uncles', and cousins' graves.
The new twist to this story in the past couple of years is that both my aunt (the one who just got out of the hospital) and my mom have put up their tombstones already there, next to my great-grandparents.  My mom and my aunt are still alive, but we can stand now over their gravesite.
I understand, them wanting to get this taken care of so we don't have to when the time comes.  But it was such a shock the first year, walking up that hill to Ma and Pa's graves and coming across my mother's.  I cried.  That time will come soon enough without a reminder, you know?  But I'm thankful my mother was there to comfort me, just like she always has been.