Whether memorably chilly or seasonably warm for the beginning of summer activities, the Memorial Day weekend has acquired many connections besides the original intent to honor soldiers who died in the Civil War. Trips, picnics, sporting events and other recreational activities join or overshadow the more solemn observances. Still, to pick just one word, I associate Memorial Day with cemeteries.

The stores remind me, of course, with flags, crosses, plastic decorations and silk flowers to place in containers, mount on gravestones, or poke into the ground. Decoration Day, an earlier name for the holiday, is indeed a time to see stone-studded burial plots take on a colorful, even festive appearance.

Searching for a personal connection with the Civil War origins of Memorial Day, I found that my maternal great-grandparents were married just a couple of years before the war. They had come to America a few years earlier. I don't know how the war affected them at their farm home in southern Illinois, but death came to their family also, as the second of their 11 children died in infancy during the war years.

Though it was a large family, I haven't known very many of the relatives. A cemetery visit helped make the more distant connections real to me.

During grade school I lived close to another cemetery. Memorial Day was one of the times when cars parked outside the cemetery fence and people from nearby or farther away visited, sometimes talking with each other for a long time. When people came to visit us, that was a treat, especially if there were children, but when people came to visit the surrounding sites, such as the cemetery, that suggested a more widespread attraction for the place. I felt like part of something important.

The cemetery was just beyond the yard and garden in back of our house. A large stump, which divided at the base and had broken into the wire of the fence, made a good point to survey the surroundings and see what was going on in the cemetery, such as mowing. Just being there, next to the cemetery but within the bounds of home, gave me a window on the world, past and present. Long, German-sounding names on the stones echoed with history. A white barn across the road marked the neighboring farm place, and the trees behind the back fence of the cemetery hinted at Lincoln Creek beyond.

The stump also served as a child's place to watch the northern sky for approaching storms. There was an unobstructed view from the horizon on up, making it the perfect vantage point to see and count occasional flashes of long, vertical lightning too distant to prompt a run for the house.

In my earlier years, men on a committee would come to cut the grass in the cemetery. They'd drive up and unload small mowers to do the job. Later on, the church bought a riding mower for the work, and my dad mowed the cemetery as well as the surrounding property and our own yard.

The riding mower had a red, dish-shaped metal seat much too large for me, and the whole machine vibrated with power. Sitting there once for a photo was plenty long enough for me.

Mowing the cemetery did include child-sized projects, though. Next to the stones, especially after Memorial Day, there were containers of flowers – real ones. When the flowers wilted and the water grew stale, someone needed to dump the decorations that were no longer decorative. Besides, mowing was easier with those things out of the way. Now I realize that I had an advantage when I helped with the job, since I didn't have to stoop as far as an adult would.

The attraction then was a negative one, however. The old water in the flower containers usually smelled bad. It was a challenge to confront each one, pour them out at arm's length and compare just how unappealing the smells were. A child would make the most of a chance to emphasize that, of course.

In an age of artificial decorations, life around a cemetery isn't quite the same. Years later, my parents again lived near a cemetery – in that case, across the road instead of on the other side of the fence. My dad still did a lot of mowing, but other people mowed the cemetery. Dad would find odds and ends of silk flowers and ribbons that blew away to new resting places in his garden and elsewhere. Some things were the same, though. Visitors getting in touch with their roots occasionally stopped to visit at the house as well as the cemetery.

That cemetery, with its trees, was a sheltered place to walk in cold, winter months and a handy spot from which to fly a springtime kite over the field beyond.

In time, my parents picked a plot in the cemetery. Not long afterward, in the days between my father's death and burial, my mother looked out the front windows and reported, "They're digging." When they were gone, I went to look at the hole. It was deep.

There was rain the day of the funeral and later also. When showers pelted the mound of hard clay in the darkness, I thought, "Dad, you missed a good storm."

If severe weather threatened when I was younger and we took shelter in the basement, Dad usually kept going up to the back door to see what was going on. Somehow that assured me that things were under control. I suppose I wondered what he saw and what I might be missing.

Maybe that helps explain the excitement of watching for lightning from the stump by the cemetery fence.

Around Memorial Day or any other time, a cemetery visit – strolling, reading names, noting the poignant or the unusual – still seems like a touch of home.