Poppies: A Memoir

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On the edge of the cemetery lay the oldest stones -the ones cracked with age, the names and numbers obscured by wind, rain, and time. It’s hard to remember who I was there with. Faces are blurred amongst the endless, endless, endless rows of white and grey stones.

“Mom, what’s that over there?” I ask. Mom must have been there. It’s tall, beyond the edge of the cemetery. Stripes and stars dangle from the pole, flutter weakly in the wind.

“I don’t know.” We walk closer on the beaten path. No one else is there, no one stops us from wandering off the cemetery grounds.

Ahead, the mass takes shape. The shape becomes clear and the image clicks in my head. The mass of soldiers, huddled beneath the flag, straining to raise the banner into the sky.

It’s a picture shown in every history class and the memorial is something everyone should see. While walking around the base, I lose sight of my mom, my grandmother, everyone we were with. My memory is dominated by the magnitude of the sculpture.

The scene was near silent, but in my head, the memory, it’s so loud.

It’s so easy to think about it being thousands of miles away, so many years ago. But then it’s right in front of you, breathing life and death and memories and forgottenness through its stone body, breaths ripping through the red, white, and blue fabric.

We were all so quiet when we walked back to the cemetery. I remember that my feet were hurting. And there were so many names. Every now and then you’d hear the guns. For a new name. A new stone.

There was a man by the Visitor’s Center. He was handing out those little red flowers with blue and white tags. “Hey little lady, why don’t ya take a poppy? Glad to see the young people still remember the dead.”

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Published November 14, 2020

Written by Cassidy Palomares ~ Graphics created by Tanya Gu