We put flowers on the graves last Sunday, for it was decoration at the home church cemetery.

Not Decoration Day. It’s almost always been just flat out “decoration,” or decoration Sunday, if we wanted to be terribly formal about it.

Ours always fell on the second Sunday in May, which is Mother’s Day. The women pinned corsages to their suits and dresses, colored flowers if their mother was still living, white if she had passed away.

Decoration used to mean a dinner “on the grounds” after the Sunday service, when heavy, old wooden tables were set up outside the church, right beside the cemetery, where the ladies set out their offerings: baked ham, fried chicken, baked beans, fried okra, soft and mealy pintos, deviled eggs, sweet creamed corn, a pot of fresh turnip greens, and a lopsided lime congealed salad: traditional, Southern comfort food.

In later years, when we grew a little more multicultural in dining habits, there might be a pan of lasagna or a Tupperware tub full of one-pot spaghetti.

You could count on having four types of slaw, three kinds of green beans, and two bowls of potato salad, one with boiled eggs and one without.

There were puffy yeast rolls, crusty cornbread, and Texas toast slathered with garlic butter.

I don’t think I ever remember seeing a pizza, but somehow, the kids survived.

You generally knew who brought what, and you made sure to get a helping of the chicken and dumplings if Aunt Omie brought them.

But be careful with anything Sue Ellen brings. She’s got cats in the house.

There might be a pan or two of dressing. It didn’t matter that it was the middle of May and not Thanksgiving or Christmas. It was acceptable to serve dressing for any holiday, except for the 4th of July, but I bet someone somewhere has done even that, and dished it up along with the grilled hot dogs.

There were no food committees to dictate who brought what, yet as the Lord led, the Lord provided.

If the Lord had laid it on Mamaw’s heart to make a roast beef with potatoes and carrots, who was Annie Ruth to tell her she had to bring a salad?

So we never ran short, and it didn’t matter if a dish was duplicated. The food was all needed, because decoration meant entire extended families would descend upon the cemetery like a horde of Mongol invaders.

We would line up for pictures, and it was only through those photographs that I had a hope of learning the names of my distant family members. It was a living family tree: generations of aunts and uncles and husbands and wives, all their children, cousins we might only see every other year, yet we were expected to know and remember each other. 

Our grandparents and great-grandparents sat under the trees in lawn chairs, fanning themselves in their Sunday best. 

The kids piled up on the tailgates of pickup trucks to quickly eat our food so we could run off to play hide-and-seek in the cemetery where we would tell stories about the dead:

Don’t talk too loudly in the cemetery. It makes the dead jealous because they can’t breathe.

In fact, if you can hold your breath while you’re in the cemetery, that’s even better.

Don’t step on a grave. It makes the dead mad because it disturbs their peaceful sleep.

Don’t sit on or prop on a tombstone. It’s the dead’s house now, and they don’t want you making a racket upstairs.

But our parents would catch us, and then we would walk through the cemetery looking at the graves while they told us about who was buried here and there and what their lives had meant.

There were silk flower arrangements of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Large ones on the massive tombstones where both husband and wife were resting in peace. Small pink or blue flowers on the baby graves, where little lambs were carved into the gray granite stones. 

There were tiny American flags placed in the ground of the graves of the veterans, on whose footstones were etched their branch and their years of service. 

Sometimes there were cracked, oval-shaped photographs mounted on the headstones, the frozen images smiling back at the living. 

Sometimes there were graves with no decorations at all. 

Sometimes there were graves with no headstone, only a metal marker where the inserted paper had faded with time, and no name remained.

The oldest graves in the cemetery had only sandstone rocks for markers, but someone had stuck clusters of blue silk roses in the red earth in front of them.

My favorite grave had a rose bush, a real, live growing thing with pink, fragrant blooms. It seemed out of place in the land of gray stone and fake flowers. That rose had been growing for as long as I can remember, next to the only pink headstone in the cemetery. 

If I ever die, I thought as a child, I want a set up like that.

Last Sunday, after performing the necessary task of placing the flowers on loved ones’ graves, I wandered through the cemetery, in pretty much the same way as I had always done. I didn’t step on any graves, and I didn’t lean on any tombstones.

But I did breathe, and I did speak loudly once or twice, to say hello to three members of another family who had arrived to put out their own decorations.

There was no dinner on the ground, for times have changed. The children were not with us either, sleeping in until the last minute before they had to get up to get ready for church. There were no cousins, no old folks, no tables groaning under the weight of the food. 

I had heard that the rose bush had been cut down. Mowing around it was too inconvenient, said the new caretakers and new cemetery committee members. It had to go.

But I suppose that a rose that has been living for over fifty years had another plan, for there in the ground where the regal bush used to bloom were several sprouts growing tall toward the sunlight. The caretakers only thought they had solved the problem, but life remained in the roots.

And it still does. Decoration was never so much about celebrating the dead as it was about being with the living. It was about appreciating your relatives and your community. It was about enjoying time with others in your church. 

It was a time for reflecting on life and what you were supposed to do in the years you were given in this life. For one day, you realized, after spending time in the cemetery, that it would not be “if I die,” but “when.”

So if we want to take one small step toward fixing the mess of this world, we might want to get back to our roots and bring back the decorations of old. It’s okay to turn the kids loose in the cemetery and then talk to them about the bigger things of life and death. It’s okay to take time to gather together as family units. It’s okay to eat all the good stuff, and I didn’t even mention dessert.

Homemade banana pudding, anyone?

And it’s most definitely okay to mow around our rose bushes instead of cutting them down.