I'm home a bit early tonite.. 4 hours to be exact. There was just nothing going on there at all. I'm not one who likes to sit around waiting for work. There is so much of it at home, I feel guilty taking pay for doing nothing.

I was thinking about Memorial Days in the past. How I loved them then and even now.
I remember going to the cemetery and planting flowers that weekend with Mum. She and Aunt Re never forgot to do this. They had a lot of flowers and an agenda. It was fun helping and I wish I were better at it myself now that they are gone. It is a long drive to the Plum Creek Cemetery where the most of the Bests and Clements are laid to rest. Wendell's family are buried at North Union just down the road. I guess I'll have to get the kids involved in planting flowers now. They will be very good helpers and keep up the tradition hopefully.

Like most families, we celebrated Memorial day by having a picnic.. Ah, but if you've never been to one of our picnics, you missed out on a treat. We had no grill. Dad and Bill usually went down into the woods and brought up old dead limbs of trees and then started building a framework for the fire. It was always a dandy.
Then they would go back into the woods and choose a fine tree branch or 6 and then carefully trim the end to a point and clean it of all the bark. These were our 'hot dog sticks'. We still do that today when we make our campfires. These sticks also doubled as Marshmallow sticks when we'd had enough hot dogs.
Mean time, Mum and we girls would be inside preparing the food. Macaroni salad was one of my favorites. Then the huge mound of juicy red sliced tomatoes on a big plate, and the strange little foil packets like little envelopes that were filled with hamburgers.. and then the little foil covered balls that held our potatoes for baking.
Ah.. such a treat! Large plates of condiments .. thick sliced juicy sweet onions.. mmmmm... it makes my mouth water to think about it. We always had a big jar of Heinz dill pickles too..
We had a homemade picnic table- dad made most of the lawn furniture himself. We took the food out on trays along with utensils and paper plates. The first thing that went on the fire was the potatoes. They take a little longer than anything else. They went right beside the hottest coals. We always waited till the fire burned down a bit so that the wood was sizzling hot coals. Then we put the hamburgers around the hot spots of the fire.. and finally we could put hot dogs on our sticks. It took a bit of patience to get the hot dogs just right.. hot and sizzly without burning them.. or worse, catching them on fire. Or catching the stick on fire and losing everything in the blaze. In a little while, the hamburger envelopes would puff up and that was the signal that they were done. It always worked perfectly. Dad would pull the burgers off the fire and they'd go on a plate. A little later, he'd check a potato with a fork and test it for tenderness. Yummy!
It was a feast, no less. The flavors were so perfect and the whole meal was a major treat.
Marshmallows came next.. Placing the 1-3 puffs on a stick, you had to stand close to the fire and let them turn a golden brown..sometimes turning the stick this way or that way to make sure all the marshmallows had the same coloration. Then.. well, we didn't make s'mores.. we simply ate them off the stick! D-licious !!!!
I wonder what my siblings remember about the picnics.. Dad sure knew how to get one put together. He knew how to place the pieces of wood and get the fire started without much ado..
Loved those picnics!