Granny, on Decoration Day

The wind whipped at Walnut Grove the way memory does, sudden and without permission. We pulled over at the cemetery entrance, my sister gathering loose change while I opened a pack of peanut butter crackers. She placed the coins and crackers at the base of the old walnut tree near the gate, our humble offering to the dead.

Decoration Day at Walnut Grove always falls on the first Sunday in June. It’s an old, yearly custom in Southern graveyards when families tend to their dead. You sweep away winter’s leaves, rinse off the grit of time, place new flowers in last year’s faded holders.

When I was little, maybe five or six, I remember scrubbing my grandpa’s headstone with a toothbrush and soap on Decoration Day, gently bringing the name back to life.

That Sunday was windy. My sister nestled a candle into the rocks on Granny’s grave and lit it. It burned for a moment before the wind snatched the flame. She didn’t try again, just left the candle sitting there, a symbol of a flame.

We visited, a small congregation of sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles. We told stories. We passed toddlers back and forth. And then, after many minutes had passed, the candle lit itself. The dead don’t usually light their own candles, but Granny wasn’t usual.

We all saw it, and we all believed it. Even the nonbelievers.

Granny was always humming and always healing. She read fortunes with playing cards, pulling the Jack of Hearts and saying, “You’ll marry a red-headed man.” She could treat colic with an onion, bites and boils with a potato, and fevers with yellow puccoon root dug straight from the earth.

When I was a baby, she worried I’d grow an “outie” bellybutton, so she taped a penny over it. It worked. I now have the deepest innie in the South.

She baked a molasses cake nobody alive knows how to make anymore. No recipe. No know-how. Just memory. It, like so many things, slipped away when she did.

Granny died the day after her eighty-first birthday. At home. Bible in her lap. Shawl resting gently across her shoulders. She fell asleep and never woke up.

Her husband died thirty years before her. His body stayed in their home for days until the burial. People came to sit, to mourn, to bring food. If Granny had to step away, someone else would sit in her place. No one left him alone. It’s what we call sitting up with the dead.

Granny was always familiar with the dead. She didn’t fear them. She lived close to the veil. After she passed, we found one of her notebooks. It didn’t hold recipes or grocery lists—it was a confessional of visions. She wrote about hearing things at night she knew weren’t there. She taunted death sometimes. 

One page said, in her careful hand:

“Please don’t cry and worry about my going away. I’ll be at peace and rest. Just get ready to meet in spirit.”

That Sunday at the cemetery, the wind kept on. It rattled the gates, stirred the silk flowers, and lifted the toddlers’ hair. But the candle stayed lit. Granny saw the candle and lit it her damn self. She let us try, then she showed us how it’s done.

I used to think belief was a choice. That day, I learned it might be an inheritance.