This Promising Day
Memorial Day is a very short season — one day, if you’re strict about it; three days, if you’re not. It isn’t spring, and it isn’t quite summer. It’s a season for noticing the transitions taking place around you, human and otherwise. Follow the Taconic north from New York City, and the grass is already ripe and taller than a standing woodchuck. Follow Interstate 80 out of Salt Lake City, and it is still a very late spring, the lilacs barely budded on the high plateau of western Wyoming, the rivers choked with runoff.
On Memorial Day, we learn with surprise, every year, how much of the year has already gone, whatever the weather says otherwise. We learn the same about ourselves — how many of our years have gone, whatever our feelings say otherwise.
This is keenly true for the families visiting grave-sites. Every gravestone in every cemetery is a milestone for those who are gone and all of us who mourn their passing. Time may ease the sense of loss somewhat, but the knowledge that so much time has passed is another loss in itself.
There is a particular genius in the timing of Memorial Day. There is not a trace of senescence in the air. Life is springing up everywhere you look, no matter how early or late the season is.
This is the season of promise, not harvest. There could not be a better time to commemorate the lives of those whose promise was cut off prematurely. After all, they died in the hope that our promise — and the promise of freedom — would go on.
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