Memorial Day Memories

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My grandmother was a very patriotic person. She taught me a lot about history and all the patriotic songs and such. She would start preparing cans, pots, rocks, aluminum foil and such a few days before. On this day she would start making up bouquets of tiger lilies, mums, poppies, iris, sunflowers, and all the flowers she had around her home. They would go into juice cans and then she would put foil on them to decorate them. My uncle would come and we would pack the cans into the back of his Chevy truck. Sometimes Grandma would also pack some sandwiches or munchies for us too. We'd set out for all the little outlying towns around where we had relatives or friends buried in those areas and then end up back here in Boise later that day. I was probably six or seven and I was the helper. We would clean around the monuments and put a nice bouquet there. My grandmother even put some flowers on a holistic doctor's grave that had helped her at some point. It was funny. One year we were driving through the cemetery where my grandfather(who was in World War I) was buried, taking a tour of the new area they had constructed there, and we saw some balloons on one with something written on them that struck us funny. They said "Get Well Soon!".