Going, going, gone . . .
I was driving down West Main Street in Lehi Saturday, on my way to ANOTHER kid baseball game, when I saw a hand-lettered sign in someone's front yard.
NIGHT CRAWLERS
$1.00 A DOZEN
I rarely see "Night Crawler" (sometimes spelled "Nite Crawler") signs anymore, although they were common enough when I was growing up in Utah County. My guess is that most residents in those days were only a generation or two removed from the farm, and a lot of them went in for country pleasures like fishing. So if you were an enterprising family (and it was a good thing to be enterprising because no one had any real money in Utah County), you would poke around for some night crawlers, make a sign, and set up shop in your own front yard.
My grandpa Philo, a truck farmer with 14 kids to support, was always looking for new ways to generate cash. I don't know if he ever sold night crawlers, but I do know he and his sons traveled to small Utah towns where they "peddled" fruit from door to door. When I was a little girl, Philo was still hard at work, selling potatoes to trading posts on the reservation in Arizona.
Once when his own kids were still young and the family desperately needed money, he hit upon an idea for selling fresh fish in the winter. He layered snow in the back of his truck, filled it with carp he caught in Utah Lake, and headed south.
Things didn't exactly work out the way he'd hoped, however. There wasn't a run on carp in Utah even if there was a Great Depression going on. And by the time he got to St. George, the only people interested in his wares were the town's cats, who followed Philo's truck (tails up!) all the way down the main street.
After the baseball games were over on Saturday, I hauled my kids on over to Philo's grave because I take the responsibility of decorating my people's graves very seriously. This is partly because I like to decorate. YES! DECORATING IS MY LIFE! But also, I've found that dressing up a grave gives you the chance to remember and retell stories about cats and carp and decent people who struggled because they never had enough resources.
Memorial Day also gives you the chance to tell your kids about the way YOU got dragged to cemeteries and how in those days people lined coffee cans with tin foil and filled them with Memorial Day essentials — irises, red peonies, lilacs (if they were still on) and snowballs clipped from snowball bushes.
Any other flower — even a rose (the mother of all flowers) — was mere filler.
As we looked out over the cemetery Saturday, we saw a few coffee cans filled with home-arranged bouquets. But mostly there were potted mums. The kind you buy at Smith's — three for $9.99. I knew exactly how much they cost because that's where my flowers came from, too.
Going, going, gone . . .
"When I'm dead," I abruptly announced to my boys last weekend, "I so do not want any of this mum garbage going on in front of MY tombstone, OK?"
They rolled their eyes because the way they see it, I'll be dead and therefore won't care if I have a potted mum from Smith's sitting on top of my head.
Dogged, I continued. "Mums are for fall. Mums are what you wear on your breast when you go to a Homecoming football game."
They were scared of me, then, because things get dicey when your mother starts unloading the "breast" word in public.
"I want peonies. I want irises. I want snowballs. For remembrance."
Things change. And by the time my kids are my age, perhaps the sight of potted mums on Memorial Day will make their middle-aged hearts sing. If that's the case, my adult children should cherish their visions because nothing lasts forever, and the sights we once loved without even knowing we loved them dwindle and disappear quietly from view.
E-MAIL: acannon@desnews.com