Memorial Day Weekend

Yea, it is almost over. Just one more day as we are not going to work Sunday except to pickup some of the garbage. Today we will hit the graves with weed whackers smoking as we chop and cut those errant blades of grass and weeds that the mowers missed. These are the little items that make the Cemetery look bad. Of course we still have a few winter decorations left and a few artificial flowers that we missed but all in all we have done a pretty through job transforming the cemetery from the winter look to a new, fresh, summer appearance complete with blooming flowers such as the traditional red geranium to the first, brilliant bursts of lilies showing their colors. Azaleas are doing their brilliant best to invigorate the grave stones as the reds are as brilliant as I have seen in many years.

The first class of baby birds have emerged and the skies are still alive with the battles of the birds as the males via for the favor of a special female or the females chase of an unwanted suitor or a tough female trying to take over their nest. Yesterday I watched as a low flying hawk circled low and slowly was approaching these fertile hunting ground and I could hear the warning cries of an unknown species far away. Those cries became even more frantic as the hawk entered the cemetery forest and then the crows picked up the warning suddenly launching like a fighter squadron heading off to battle the interloper. Diving at the hawk time after time protecting their nests I felt I was watching a dog fight of WWI, allied biplanes battling The Red Baron. Snoopy temporarily disappears below the treetops and reemerges with a rodent, of some type in his beak, quickly breaking through the circling birds and then establishing a new cruising height that few chasing birds are able to reach and suddenly calm becomes the norm again in the 20 acre forest.

Today we will be joined by a couple of dozen veterans from our local Vietnam Veterans association as they change out the colors on the hundreds of veterans graves from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam. The cemetery suddenly will come alive with the bright red, white and blues. We are very happy that none of our local veterans have died in the Iraq Conflict and would require a flag. God Bless the United States of America and our young men and women that are fighting to keep us free.