Corum Cemetery

This is the place where they are; Most of the family that I garnered my knowledge of life from. These people are there, but I am still here, realizing the many memories I have of them. In the line first is the evilest of them all. God must have decided to take the worst first. The mind is a great thing. We as children kept that cemetary up. Keeping up meant to push mow the whole graveyard. Each rock was trimmed around with scissors. We did not have even clippers designed to trim what the lawn mower did not get. The year long duty consisted of mowing the entire four acres. This chore was done starting in the spring. Decoration at the cemetery was always the first Saturday in May. This was the beginning of my brother and I having a hundred and twenty five dollars to split for the summer. Grandmother spaced the cuttings into five times, this way we would be paid twenty five dollars each time. She was always handy with figuring out how to make the most of a little cash. Her input to the work was following us around making sure we did it right. Right the way she assumed was the right way. She did in her bonnet and longsleeved mens shirt get down on the gound with scissors to cut the grass around the stones. Decoration was a thing that she deemed as an important day. She got the flowers to the graves the Friday afternoon before. It was a given that we took soapy water and an old rag to wash down Grandaddy's tombstone. Amazingly to me I still found the cleaning we did to his grave as something we did make look better. Better, shoot even pretty. Simple thing that we really conceived as a social event. The bad times that these dead folks gave us really did not matter when we placed the flowers on them in May. It was just what we did. Grandmother said many times, "I wonder if they would put flowers here for us?" Then she would answer the question with the answer we she gave by the way she asked it. In the Corum Cemetery if the dead could talk I wonder how many would be saying some sort of appologies. Going there as I will tomorrow I may listen close and imagine that I hear an; I am sorry.........