monagustafsonaffinito   CONVERSATIONS

I don’t remember this, given that I was less than a year old, but here’s the Memorial Day story that was removed from My Father’s House to reduce the size of the book. In those days it was called Decoration Day. It was also the time of green growth for the new house at 187 Stafford AVenue.

As winter departed, Carl watched the weather. Bu mid-May the temperature ranged from lows in the 40s to highs in the 90s. Rain was not as frequent as he would have liked. Natural rainfall is better for young grass seed like that planted the previous fall, but on dryer days the water hose kept the potential lawn moist. Everyone had a turn at the daily task of holding a finger against the stream to create a lightly broadcast spray. By Decoration Day on Saturday, May 30, 1930, marking the beginning of the first summer at 187, the lawns both front and back were rewarding the effort with green shoots thickening like an adolescent boy’s growing beard.

Jennie prepared a warm picnic lunch that would become a Decoration Day tradition: Meatloaf and escalloped potatoes. This year she made apple pie for dessert. But there was deep sadness as those who had given their lives were memorialized. Grieving Swannie’s death, Carl and Jennie found happiness in the knowledge that Mona was lucky, being born at a time when peace, at least, was guaranteed.

Like a prisoner set free, Carl celebrated the summer by exchanging his suit and tie for work clothes as soon as he got home from work. After the meal he headed to the garden, not recognizing the fall of darkness until it wrapped itself around him like a thick blanket.

“You seem like you’re praying when you’re working out there,” Jennie commented.

“It is prayer.” Carl never worked the soil without remembering the barrenness of Torsäs.

Rising from bulbs pressed into the soil in the fall, there were the beginnings of multicolored tulips, yellow daffodils, and delicate white irises with leaves revealing gentle lavender veins. A burst of low-lying deep purple crocuses began to form a delicate wall along the tidy ridge separating the developing green grass from the lawn’s periphery.

In the future there would be geraniums and zinnias, and dreams of phlox to come up in the next spring season. The shadier areas anticipated a multicolored array of impatiens.

From the nearby woods Carl and Harvey brought home small cedars forming a future partial wall marking the end of the property. For this first summer, marigolds would form a protective defense around the trees.

By July an automatic sprinkler replaced the individual finger to disperse water widely and delicately. All that was now required was judicious movement of the hose every half-hour or so. Truth be told, the whole family appreciated the days when a long, gentle spring rain came.