As previously noted, Spring has forsaken Humptulips County this year, but it was warm enough on Memorial Day for me to grease the tractor and mow parts of the farm while Helen and her sister were visiting their parents’ nearby graves.
Mowing by tractor is a relatively mindless event, in that the driver’s principal obligation is to follow the lines of his previous pass and not miss any wayward clumps of grass. This does not take much in the way of active intelligence, so the driver’s mind is free to wander at will among the various subjects important to him at the time. In other words, mowing by tractor is a good time for personal contemplation on a subject of interest to the driver.
Since it was Memorial Day and since Helen was away honoring her dead, I found myself thinking of my parents and their relatives. Since all of these folks are buried far from our farm, visiting their grave sites was simply not possible. I do visit my parents’ and stepfather’s graves in Walla Walla whenever I am visiting, and rest alongside each of them for awhile by sitting beside their gravestones. Their sleep is undertaken beneath the enormous Eastern Washington sky and they are now of its earth. And while I find such visits peaceful, I have never found their graves to be imbued with their spirits – just with my sense of their loss.
For their spirits reside within me and they shared my Memorial Day mowing duties. Each mindless circle of the tractor gave me more memories: my father’s and my uncle Orville’s breakfast cooking extravaganzas; my uncle Orville’s obsession with real fireworks; my mother’s frequent reminders to eat my vegetables and brush my teeth; the seemingly haunted house on Boyer Avenue in Walla Walla where my siblings and I were raised; my mother’s sisters and their respective families; my grandfathers and grandmothers on both sides of the family, one of whom, Bunny, lived with us in 6 month stretches when I was a child and tried repeatedly to teach me to play the piano (which I failed at miserably to my eternal regret due to a preoccupation with being outdoors with the neighborhood gang).
And while I was mowing, I came to the realization that graves visitation, while an honorable affair, is not really the essence of Memorial Day; memory is. So while I mowed, my memories mowed with me and I passed the afternoon in pleasant mental homage to those of the generation preceding mine and curious contemplation of how their ancestors might have passed their times on earth. I came to the conclusion that working the land – albeit with a tractor and not by means of a horse and plow or by hand – is exactly the sort of activity that many of my ancestors might have enjoyed.
I wish for my children and grandchildren that they might enjoy their own tractor dreams at the time when I am no longer able to be physically present in their lives and that they not worry about visits to wherever I take my final rest, for tractor dreams are as much the stuff of life as is the tingling anticipation of one’s future. They are not dreams to be taken lightly, for in remembrance is grace.
