Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

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Up North, back in Days of Horrible Cold, I lived in Chicagoland from age seven to 22. After making a great escape to Florida and warmth, moving all over this state, spending four years in New Orleans and Shreveport and one year back in Chicago, I came home to Florida for good.

Which doesn't mean I've forgotten, for one single second, those Days of Horrible Cold. Folks, the last couple of winters, you've finally seen some of the snow-and-ice brutality we had for three winters in a row in the late 1970's. I can out-Snow Story 99.9% of anyone reading here. I worked outside in that stuff.

Ah, but springtime...Spring is my favorite time of year, and always has been, since those early childhood days in sunny Southern California.

Moving up North? Well. ksis was four, k seven, kbro almost nine. Hopefully, all of us have finally forgiven the p'rental units for the great travesty of kidnapping us three innocent offsprings, tearing us away from sunshine and mountains, warmth and deserts, ocean and beaches and those round hills of golden grass, and people who at least acted friendly and considerate and welcoming...

then plunking us into an atmosphere of icy coldness in every sense of the words; into relentless gray from skies to trees to buildings to land; flat flat flat everywhere you turn; a few cornfields and cattle, a couple windmills, areas of wilderness, yes and a beautiful little spring-fed lake, a polluted river...that was about all.

Except for springtime. In spring there were days that were not gray.

kmom reminded me not long ago of a day in my first fall up north. It was us kids' first experience of cold, of snow, of ice. The birds had disappeared, it seems; and I wondered where they'd gone. Naturally, I asked my mom, who Knows Many Things, and tried hard to teach us kids in the same positive, intelligent, bright manner that guides her own life.

She explained:

--They all flew south for the winter!

and to her shock I burst into tears, sobbing uncontrollably.

Oh, my poor mother! We gave my parents no peace about this move they made way back in 1965. They're still there, in that beautiful spacious house, where I saw the third huge generation of 17-year cicadas emerging in droves when I visited two years ago.

My friend Sylvia, from Brazil, had a sister who moved to Denver. I asked Sylvia how she felt about this Denver business. She told me: --I'm a tropical girl.

Me too.

We made it through that first winter, and the ones that followed. Spring came. And over the years, Memorial Day came to represent the dividing line between winter and real spring, the kind of spring that was safe, that stayed. Sometimes Memorial Day was cold or rainy. But there was no snow or ice any more.

In springtime the birds come back.

An outing! Family time. We'd set out from the Far North suburbs and have a Memorial Day picnic with relatives in a Chicago park. Corn on the cob! Hot dogs, watermelon. Aged, distant relatives of my mother's, Esther, Ed, others, who'd all passed away by a few years after we'd met them. People in my family rarely die, and Ed's funeral was the only one I attended until my own adulthood. All four of my grandparents lived halfway to forever; but until we left the Southwest, it seemed only my father had other relatives besides his parents. This largish bunch of kmom's uncles and second cousins was a little bewildering.

A day off school! Civic duty time. As a Brownie, then Girl Scout, then playing the flute in the school band, I walked along in our tiny small-town Memorial Day parades. I never liked parades until I moved to New Orleans, and the arthritis made certain types of walking painful, so these were more endured than enjoyed.

My child's mind really didn't understand what all this was about, anyway. Our thin groups walking - I can't say anyone actually *marched* - various Boy and Girl Scouts and a little school band, maybe a 4H Club group I never saw or even knew existed elsewhere during the year...A straggly bunch of old men in odd pointy blue hats with VFW on them - over the years these were joined by young men, and sometimes there was a complete divide between the old and *new* veterans, they'd walk in two separate groups, seeming completely unaware of the others' existence.

We'd end up at a small country cemetery with bare spots in the grass paths, old headstones leaning, fine ones upright and almost glowing in that clear, young springtime light. One of the old vets in a VFW hat would make a speech about war and democracy and safety and remembering those who gave everything for us. Sometimes his voice quavered with age. Sometimes there'd be a gun salute, shattering the quiet air in the small country cemetery with sound and gunpowder smoke and shock waves reverberating.

Death is a part of life. How many times have we heard this? And death feeds life, it's that ancient cycle. We all die, one way or another.

But there's a difference, an added dimension, when someone dies in the course of working to save others. Whatever your beliefs about war, this is a nearly universal truth: those who enter it voluntarily believe they are there to protect the lives of others. Of us, here at home. And those who enter war involuntarily, or become part of the collateral damage accompanying all wars, make yet another sacrifice.

What they all did was this: they gave their lives to help preserve ours. To give us time to reach spring and see that sun shine again.

I tried to find out why Memorial Day is held at the end of May. Its history is shrouded in murk. Apparently it just sort of happened that way. A series of groups and towns independently arrived at the same time of year to honor their war dead.

Springtime.

Which makes perfect sense to me.
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