My mother is of the generation that refers to the Memorial Day holiday as “Decoration Day,” a solemn weekend in America when living family members take flowers to cemeteries where beloved relatives -- particularly veterans -- are buried. Leah and I were in Ohio this past weekend visiting our parents, and I drove Mom to the farm country where my grandparents are buried and Mom and I placed flowers on the graves.
Ohio’s farmland is stunning at this time of year. The fields of corn, wheat and hay are dripping with fertility in the humid June air, and a thunderstorm (Leah and I experience lots of rain where we live in the Pacific Northwest but we rarely see thunder and lightening) moved over us when we happened to be out traveling in the car. There was one bolt of lightening in particular that spanned the entire sky as far as we could see from east to west, and the accompanying boom of thunder made us jump way out of our seats.
There’s a palpable sense of history and Americana to be seen in the Midwest. The landscape there for me is full of visual clues that I’m most certainly in the land of my farming grandparents, and of the generations who settled there before them.
I don't know who it was who came up with that well-worn phrase: “You can’t go home again,” but I beg to differ.
