Memorial Day is intended to honor those who gave their lives while in service of our country. I grew up in a very small town, and learned the names early of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. We remembered and honored them all year around by cherishing their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers. The local Legion held a ceremony at the local cemetery each Memorial Day and I always tried to be there for the bugle and rifle salute, even after I had moved away.
But in addition to honoring fallen Veterans, it was also "Decoration Day," a chance for multiple generations to wander together, tracing a path between the graves of relatives and friends, leaving a small bouquet of posies and sharing stories about people I only learned to know through those anecdotes and reminisces. For me, that meant time spent with my maternal grandmother, Inez.
I appear to have inherited a lot of "rules" from Inez -- for decorating the graves but also other things. Some of these were straight out of the etiquette books (we owned them all), but others were just "understood." When I acted in accordance with these rules, Inez would note this and say, approvingly, "she didn't lick that up off the ground." It sounds very homely and colloquial (and unlike her usual speech, which was very correct and a bit formal) but is actually was a reference to Topsy in the book "Uncle Tom's Cabin." That's how things were with Inez... even the most seemingly innocuous comment or punchline usually had a subtext.
The Decoration Day Rules dictated that the flowers taken to the cemetery must be "mine," -- buying flowers, real or silk, is not acceptable. Using my own purchased-for-other-purposes silk flowers was acceptable but the vast preference was to have fresh flowers from home. Every Iowa house I owned was thus planted with bearded Iris, peonies, Lily of the Valley, Lilacs and Bleeding Hearts, and with forsythia, flowering almond and flowering quince for "backbone." The hope was always that something would be in bloom when Decoration Day came around. Some years, it wasn't much; other years, it was a bonanza of big fluffy blooms in pale pink, rose pink and dark pink. Inez really loved the color pink.
Minnie Inez Lavinia Frantz was born in 1895 in the miniscule town of Weston, Illinois, to Mary Rilla Allison and Henry Jay Frantz. Henry Frantz was not actually her father, it turns out, but I truly don't think either of the two of them had any idea that was the case. She always went by "Inez;" The rest of the names are on her birth and death records, but no one ever called her anything but "Inez." She was the youngest of four children. Inez told my mother that her earliest memory was of sitting on her father's shoulder while their house burned down. I found a newspaper account of the fire and Inez would have only been a little over two, so I suspect she remembered people telling her about the fire.
The family moved to Perry, Iowa, in 1901 where Henry ran a drainage tile company. Inez trained and worked as a teacher. In 1916, she married Fred Holmes, the divorced only child of very Catholic parents, ten years her senior. Two weeks after their daughter's first birthday, Fred took a turn too fast and drove into a bridge abutment, dying sixteen days later. Inez sold their farm and she and Jean moved in with her in-laws. In 1923, she met a tall, smiling man at a local baseball game and their romance sounds like it was one for the ages. Inez married Shug Thomas and moved a few miles east to Woodward, where my mother, Dorothy, was born a year later.
Inez continued to teach, eventually being named principal at the Woodward State Hospital School. Shug's mother, Dora, lived with the family until her death in 1938. Just three years later, in 1941, Shug died at Mayo following surgery to remove a pituitary tumor.
I think Inez lost herself for a while when Shug died. Once Dorothy graduated from high school in 1942, Inez moved to Rock Island and began working at the arsenal.
Twenty-four year old Jean was working as an operator at the Woodward telephone exchange, and eighteen-year-old Dorothy was a linotype operator for the Woodward newspaper. Both young women made some unfortunate decisions, and I think Inez did, too. In 1947, she married John Daniel Smith, a "Pennsylvania Dutchman" with lots of money but whom my mother never liked. He and Inez operated a candy store in Burlington for a while and he paid for extensive renovations to the house in Woodward before disappearing from their lives.
Inez became one of what passed for village elders in her little town, the widowed ladies who graciously and implacably set expectations for everything from behavior to civic action. She decorated the newly-expanded house (in pink) and furnished it with an eclectic mixture of antiques, wicker and classical quality. She knitted amazing lace and complicated swing coats; she tossed out six cakes in her quest to produce one perfect specimen for Bridge club. She had Haviland place settings and delicate etched Fostoria goblets to serve light luncheons for four dozen, and I'm sure she did.
After I was born, she turned her talents in my direction. Jean had eloped and been estranged from the family for many years; I think Inez lavished all her pent-up attention on me as a result. The summers we stayed with her, I remember her walking the house on stormy summer nights with a lighted candle. I thought it was because she loved storms so much but Mom told me much later she was terrified of them. Any sensible person would have been -- we were surrounded by enormous trees that had been killed by Dutch Elm disease, and the storms routinely blew them down, blocking roads and occasionally destroying houses. But Inez never let on to me that she was afraid and I saw the whole thing as a grand adventure.
We moved back to Woodward when Mom learned she was pregnant -- she was 46 and was determined to be surrounded by a support system. One year after my brother was born, my father had a heart attack while we were raking leaves. After she called for the ambulance, Mom told me to take Patrick to a neighbor's house, and the neighbor took us to pick up Inez and brought us all back to the house to await word from the hospital. Inez tried to prepare me for bad news; she may have talked with Mom at the hospital and heard that things were Not Good, I don't know. In any event, I was angry with her for what I saw as her pessimism, and I think I blamed her a little for Dad's death, for not wishing hard enough that he'd be okay. Two weeks after my ninth birthday, not even two months after my father died, we were at Inez's house and I was trying to open the cellar door to get to the snow shovel. Inez came out to help me and slipped on the ice, breaking her hip. I took Patrick into the bathroom and put him in the empty tub where I allowed him to unroll ever bit of toilet paper we owned as we waited for the ambulance to come, this time all the way from Des Moines. I remember Inez protesting as they wanted to cut off her brand new girdle. A week later, Inez died in the hospital in Des Moines. She'd been hallucinating, according to the adults I'd overheard, dreaming that I was with her. The night she died, before the snow plow brought the doctor to our door to give my mother the news, Inez visited me, which gave me a chance to let go of my anger and embrace the love we'd always had for one another. I'm so grateful for that.
She wasn't buried for months after the January service; it was a terrible winter and the ground was too frozen. Her one request was that she not be buried with 'Mother Thomas' between her and Shug, but she had to know that the family owned four plots, and that Dora and George Thomas were between Shug and the fourth spot. I expect she remains exasperated about that. Mom couldn't afford a marker in 1971 but we got one for her and one for Shug when we ordered Mom's in 2000.
I've not seen Inez again but I hear from her regularly... when I'm baking, when I wear her jewelry, when the room we just painted beige or off-white or orange turns out to somehow be... pink, instead. And I think of her as I contemplate Memorial Day, a reminder that my family is always be with me, in my heart -- and in my head.
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