The Wisdom and Welcome of Heflin
The cars and trucks ramble up the one lane unpaved road, a half mile off the county road, to Heflin Cemetery. It is the first Sunday in May and, as we do every year this time, we make the pilgrimage to this country family cemetery to decorate the graves with flowers, attend a service, share a meal, and remember the people we loved, or maybe didn’t even know, who died before us and are buried here.
Decoration Day brings us together in a unique and tangible way. We are bound to it by tradition. Decoration creates a connection between the present and earlier generations. Decoration Day at Helfin Cemetery is an unbroken practice that has held for over 100 years. I love being part of this tradition, and look forward to handing it down to my son and the generations to follow.
Rituals are a powerful part of being human: they help ground us, reassure us, and tie us to our values. They provide us with a sense of predictability and consistency. They connect us back to our sense of self and what is meaningful in our lives.
At Heflin, our rituals and traditions do all of these things, and they also serve a practical purpose in cleaning up the cemetery, decorating it with flowers and bringing us all together. And while we perform these rituals every year, they can become habit, and we can easily lose sight of their deeper meaning. The deeper meaning gleaned from those rituals is what matters most.
There is ritual in the very timing of Decoration. We meet the first Sunday in May, always in springtime, around the time of Easter.
Springtime is the season of renewal, the season of birth and rebirth. It is the season where we emerge from dormancy and the quiet darkness of winter into the bright humming blooming of springtime and life.
The aliveness of the season is tangible to everyone in the very weather at Decoration: the Brown County climate in early May can be anything. Some years are hot, dry and dusty, the summer already bearing down. Other years are surprisingly chilly, when a late spring cool front pushes cold air through. Some years bring rain, some years have even brought sleet. No matter the weather, though, we hold our service in a roughhewn, open-air tabernacle: nothing more than a metal roof suspended on four wooden posts, with plain walls on two sides, the front and back walls nonexistent, open to the elements. We feel the season on our skin.
My grandmother, Ona Louise Winn Burns was the matriarch of the family and ruled Decoration when she was alive. Every year she would bring a thick wool blanket or two with her, and when she arrived at Heflin, she would stack them neatly on the pew where she wanted to sit. Her favorite spot was in the second-row pew, close to the front but not quite. After decorating the graves, we would come into the tabernacle to get ready for the service. If the weather was warm, she would lay the blankets down on these hard wooden pews to soften them a bit. If it was cold, she’d pull us grandkids around her and put the blankets over our legs and hers to keep us warm and cozy. Sitting next to grandmama was a hallowed spot.
When we bring flowers with us to Decoration, and place them on the graves, we celebrate spring and the cycle of birth, death and rebirth in nature. The wildflowers picked right around Heflin have a rugged beauty about them – wild bluebonnets, soft-petaled Indian paintbrush, red, orange and yellow Indian blankets, and delicate purple Prairie Verbena.
When we were little, our mothers, our aunts and grandmother handed us small handfuls of wildflowers to place on the graves, their stems wrapped in wet paper towels to keep them fresh. I can still feel the sticky leaves and stems of the purple wild geranium.
Flowers remind of us the beauty of nature, and the cycles of seasons in life. They also serve a purpose in drawing us out into the cemetery to walk amongst the graves to place the flowers on them, giving us a chance to get a little closer, read what is written on the headstones, and rekindle our memories and our connections.
Springtime at Heflin is as it reads in the Song of Solomon chapter 2:
For beloved, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtle dove is heard on our land.
There is ritual also in the food we bring and share at Decoration.
There is ritual in the preparation: calling each other and figuring out who is bringing what this year, cooking food at home or picking it up, packing it into serving dishes, placing it carefully in the car so nothing spills, then putting it all out on the pews, eating it all together.
A lot of people might find lunch in the cemetery a strange thing to do, but it is easy and familiar at Heflin. Supper on the grounds is something you find across the south. At Heflin we keep close with the original tradition, pushing the six or eight pews together after the service to form a serving surface, and everyone finding a spot to eat on a remaining pew there in the tabernacle, amongst the headstones, no matter the weather, with no ACs to cool us or heaters to keep us warm.
The foods of Decoration are reliably familiar: fried chicken, ham, brisket, macaroni and cheese, devilled eggs, all the pies and cakes. While the food is always wonderful, it’s not necessarily the food that’s most important. It’s the memories that this offering of food conjures up. I am reminded of Grandmama’s cornbread -- nothing more than yellow cornmeal, oil, milk, eggs, and a pinch of sugar, cooked in a cast iron skillet -- and the way she used to perch on a stool while the rest of us sat around their kitchen table in chairs eating supper. She loved sitting there on the periphery, listening into the conversation, laughing at the stories people told. She took special joy in feeding her grandsons. We all remember her saying, “I love watching you boys eat.”
I remember sitting on the back porch helping Grandmama snap and shell piles of black-eyed peas; and I remember making homemade vanilla ice cream in an old-fashioned wood-sided ice cream maker. My grandfather, Papa, always had one of us grandkids sit on top, letting us believe this was essential to the process, I realize now it was his way of joining us in, making us feel useful, and keeping us close.
So much in life happens at the table. So many good memories come with food. The poet Joy Harho, writes, in her poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here”:
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
…
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
All of us gathered at Decoration on this one Sunday in May have shared so much, learned so much, grown so much, at Helfin’s table, made of wooden pews. The food we share at Decoration provides nourishment, cements our memories and stitches us together.
Finally, there is ritual in the talks we give at Decoration, a tradition that helps us make meaning and maintain connection as we hand our stories down.
We listen to stories about our ancestors, and learn of the ways that their lives have molded ours. We hear stories of the very first settlers: the young child who died from eating wild berries, and was the first one buried here on the Heflin’s land in 1876. We hear stories of war and also of peaceful times. We hear stories of the harshness of the land – the drought of the 1950s, dust storms blowing through, livestock lost and homes burned to the ground.
We also hear stories of great tenderness and beauty, and the bounty of this land – Grandmama playing the piano and singing I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, the image of tall grass in the fields as tall as your horse’s shoulders, Papa building fence by hand, never taking a day off, never complaining about the weather.
Family photo ca 1950s (clockwise from left): George Burns (Papa), Billy Burns, Mary Margaret Burns, Ona Burns (Grandmama), Mary Etta Winn (Mommie Winn), Paul Burns
The stories we tell are how we remember, and pass things down, and make meaning of our lives. The poet Mark Nepo, in “The Book of Awakening” says: Stories are like little time capsules. They carry pieces of truth and meaning over time….Often we repeat stories, not because we are forgetful or indulgent, but because there is too much meaning to digest in one expression. So we keep sharing the story that presses on our heart until we understand it all.
A story I repeat often in my mind is one my father told at Decoration many years ago, it was of his time on a troop ship taking he and other men from the West Coast of the US to the coast of Vietnam. “There was very little on the troop ship to do other than think about getting to Vietnam,” my father tells, “and worry about what would happen when you got there. As we would lie on the deck for hours at a time, I noticed a very simple, but strange, somewhat comforting, thing that I kept with me the whole time I was there. I noticed that if I would lie on my back and look straight up into the sky, the sky looked exactly the same as it did here in Central Texas, the clear blue of the sky, the completely unpolluted air, cumulous clouds drifting slowly by, and at night the sky so clear and black and deep that the stars seemed to almost come down closer to you. And I found that if I looked up in the sky I could drift back to Salt Mountain and Gap Creek and I could shut out the unfamiliar land and dangers and risk of Vietnam. I did it many times when I was in Vietnam, I would look into the sky for a period of time and in my mind, I could drift right back home again.”
I think of this story often and the comfort that it brings; that no matter where we are in the world, and what sorrows, or tragedies or adversity we might face, there is comfort in knowing we share this common sky.
We can come back to this place in our minds and feel the blessing of the roots and deep connections we have with our ancestors, the land, and the community of Helfin.
The traditions of Decoration ground us in a familiar place with rituals that make us think about death and remember the people who have died before us. It encourages us to reflect on our own lives, and how we can live them with more intention. Mary Oliver wrote of this in her poem, “When Death Comes”:
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
…
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
When I was in my early 30s, I was living in Los Angeles, lonely, adrift, and homesick. I called Grandmama one afternoon and asked her what she thought I should do. She said “Honey, are you happy day to day? Because if you aren’t, then you need to make a change. In the end that’s all we have.”
Life is short, the benediction says, and we don’t have much time to gladden the hearts of those who make the journey with us. So be swift to love and make haste to be kind.
Heflin teaches these things in the way that it reminds of us of the cycles of death and life, and those who have passed before us.
Enjoy the day to day, it says, live your life to its fullest.
View from the tabernacle at Heflin Cemetery