Spring 19C in the Orchard

John Everett Millais (British artist, 1829-96) Spring

19C Personification of Spring by Franz Xavier Winterhalter (1805-c 1873)

Franz Xavier Winterhalter (German Academic Painter, 1805-c 1873) The Spring

Memorial Day

 Remember Them...

From Decoration Day to Memorial Day

The years following the end of the Civil War in 1865 saw American communities tending to the remains & graves of an unprecedented number of war dead. All of the previous wars & conflicts fought by the United States combined did not add up to the deaths in the Civil War.

For more than a century, the ritual of visiting cemeteries, memorials & gravesites served as the  start of summer. It was an annual act of remembrance, clearing away the dirt & grime from those hallowed markers. It was a time to decorate those personal memorials. Until 1971, Memorial Day was known as "Decoration Day."

On the 1st official Decoration Day -- May 30, 1868 -- future president James A. Garfield, a former general, addressed a crowd of 5,000 gathered at Arlington National Cemetery: "our children's children shall come to pay their tribute of grateful homage. For this are we met to-day...assemblies like this are gathering at this hour in every State in the Union.

"Thousands of soldiers are to-day...visiting the silent encampments of dead comrades who once fought by their side. From many thousand homes, whose light was put out when a soldier fell, there go forth today to join these solemn processions of loving kindred & friends."

After Garfield spoke, the 5,000 visitors made their way into the cemetery to visit the tens of thousands of graves in the newly formed Arlington cemetery.

But Decoration Day was not an official holiday. May 30 was a day seen by the Grand Army of the Republic, an association of Union Civil War veterans, as an official day of remembrance for people across the country. The idea was to honor the war's dead by decorating the graves of Union soldiers.

Local municipalities & states adopted resolutions over the following years to make Decoration Day an official holiday in their areas. Each of the former Union states had adopted a Decoration Day by 1890.

As time went on, "Memorial Day" began to supplant "Decoration Day" as the name of the holiday, & it became a day to honor all fallen American troops, not just Union soldiers from the Civil War. After the 2nd World War, Memorial Day was the term in more common usage, & the act of remembering all of America's fallen took on a renewed importance.

In 1968, the U.S. government passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which put major holidays on specific Mondays to give federal employees 3-day weekends. Memorial Day was one of these holidays. 

It all went into effect in 1971 &, by then, there were no more Civil War veterans - but there were decades of American vets from later wars.   

Memorial Day Memories & Mountain Laurel & Peter Kalm 1716-1779

Memorial Day always brings 3 things to my mind.  - 

The peonies that my mother & I gathered to place on the graves of loved ones, when I was a child. - 

The incredible bravery of my great grandfather & his 2 brothers who left the South to go to Illinois to enlist in the Civil War to fight against slavery. - 

And, way up here in the woods where I live, the mountain laurel always bloom on Memorial Day.  The amazing blooms peek out of the sides of the lane up to the house, and they define the area between the grass & the woods surrounding the rear of the house.  A soft, sweet, beautiful reminder of the meaning of the day.

The American mountain laurel was named Kalmia latifolia during the 1700s, when America was still just a collection of colonies.  The plant was first recorded in America in 1624, soon after the English began to settle along the Atlantic coast.  The genus Kalmia was named by Carolus Linneaus himself, for his student Pehr (Peter) Kalm, who sailed across the Atlantic to travel through the countryside collecting plant samples to send back to Sweden. In Kalm’s account of Mountain Laurel, he calls the plant the “spoon tree.”

Memorial Day

“Nature is the art of God.” Dante (1265-1321) - Creatures are filling the Spring Earth

Holding on to the Sweet Divine - “The Lord God took man & put him in the Garden of Eden to work it & to keep it.”  Genesis 2:15.