Decoration Day: Building a Sort of Special Place

When I think of the Duckett-Childs family, I think of Duckett Decoration and the Childs-Duckett (or it Duckett-Childs?) reunion. Decoration is on the first Sunday in June and the reunion is the preceding Saturday.

There is a pleasing rhythm to this – every year, I know that this is the time we go to southwest Arkansas. We don’t have to wait for a funeral or an invitation to go.We know that if we go, people will be glad to see us, and we’ll get a couple of good meals out of the trip.

There is a rhythm to how we spend the weekend, too. We usually drive down in a rush (because our grade schooler is usually still in school, due to making up snow days) from Fayetteville to get to the Cossatot River State Park in time for dinner Saturday night. We stay well into the evening so the kids can go swimming and eat s’mores that Frankie and Ronnie Duckett bring. (And I try not to think about cottonmouths.) Then, we go back to the motel long after dark, only to get up in a rush Sunday morning so I can buy plastic flowers at WalMart’s. We check out of the motel and head south to Duckett, usually just in time to miss most of the service in the pole shed, but in plenty of time to decorate our graves, tell our stories, and be ready for grace.

The rhythm has changed over the thirty-plus years I’ve been going regularly. I don’t fly into Little Rock and rent a car, we drive. Our reunion isn’t at the Wickes Community Center, it’s catered. Nanny (Floy (Turrentine) Childs) doesn’t pick bouquets of hydrangeas from around the little green house in Magnolia, we bring them from Fayetteville or buy them at WalMart’s and put the flowers on her grave. Poppaw (Orval Childs) no longer asks “Why the cemetery is on both sides of the road?” when we go through Coop Prairie. (The answer is, “To put dead people in.”) And they don’t tell me stories about the folks who are buried there. Instead, I try to tell my daughter those stories.

When Don and I started getting serious, I wanted him to go with me, to see who my people are. He (despite having a father from Kentucky) was puzzled by the concept. Dinner on the grounds seemed especially peculiar to him. But now that we’ve been married thirteen (!) years, he kinda gets it, and certainly looks forward to dinner and me seeing family that we don’t usually see other times of the year. I found this story from Summer 2011 – and it explains a good bit of what I’m trying to say.

As the folklorist says in the NPR interview, “The younger people, who were never born there, still feel now a connection to it ’cause from childhood they were brought there and it became this sort of special place. So, in effect, the tradition there changes but it’s strong.” I’m hoping that this blog can serve as a virtual “special place” – a way to form connections with our family, even if they can’t come home the first Sunday in June.