Apart from its more solemn meaning Memorial Day, or as we termed it in my childhood, Decoration Day, was a time of joy. The last Friday before Memorial Day was always the last day of school, just as the Tuesday following Labor Day always marked the beginning of school.

Memorial Day was the day before the beginning of our summer-long swimming season. Memorial Day was, of course, the day we packed the car with glass jars, buckets and buckets of flowers and set forth to decorate the graves of our kin folk throughout our section of Nebraska.

It was a day’s adventure. I was always allowed to take a friend along. There was a picnic lunch for us to eat at the proper time and pop or ice-cream at whatever place was open at close of day.

If we still had living relatives at whatever town adjoined the graves to be decorated they were usually old and full of stories concerning the occupants of the graves we were about to visit.

No matter how old the living relatives we visited they always had more jars of flowers waiting for us to be taken with the rest to the graves.

My mother was born with a desire to plant and harvest. My father did his best. Sent by my mother to show a friend around the garden my father gave it the good old college try.

He was a little vague when it came to identifying flowers.

One exception, he could readily recognize strawberry blossoms. The interested visitor would point to a clump of flowers, “What are these?”

My father, without losing his cool, would re-direct her gaze, “These,” he would state firmly, “are strawberry blossoms.”

The visitor, a merciful woman, would go on to the next patch of flowers, “And these?”

“The strawberries,” my father informed her, “are everbearing. We have them all summer long.”

And as she approached another stand of flowers: “Really quite a good flavor, they have.”

So it went. My mother appeared on the scene. She and her friend went their way leaving a

somewhat relieved man to the contemplation of the strawberries. Within the week he received a package from the visitor.

It contained a book filled with pictures of gorgeously colored “Flowers of North America.”

In his Flowers-that-bloom-in-the-spring annals, though, I think my father reached the peak, in what would forever be known in the family as the Plum Tree Scandal.

A friend was planning to remove plum trees from his yard. Would dad like to have them? Indeed he would.

So off he set on a Saturday morning, spade in hand and a partially filled bucket to hold the saplings until he could get them home for replanting.

With a song in his heart, dad set about digging up the trees. Two trees he had out and had just started on the third when he was interrupted by the woman next door, who leaned out of her window and demanded, “Why are you digging up those trees?”

Without pausing, but for a second from his work, my father called back, “I’m digging them up because I can’t think of any other way to get them out of the ground.”

“They don’t belong to you!” snarled the woman.

“The owner gave them to me,” snapped my father.

The woman disappeared from the window, too soon she was back. “I knew where Mrs. So-in-so was,” she said. “I telephoned her. Just as I thought she didn’t give those trees to anyone. She paid a man to put them in.

&uot;She’s madder than a wet hornet. If she wasn’t visiting her poor sick sister she’d be back home this instant to tell you what she thinks of you. She said to tell you to get those trees back in their holes this minute. And if you don’t I’m to call the police. I may call them anyway. It’s thieves like you who give the town a bad name!”

Well, like a character in one of Wodehouse’s novels, dad wasn’t exactly disgruntled, but he wasn’t gruntled either. He felt in his pocket for the slip of paper on which was written the address and realized with horror that he was in the wrong block.

As he told us later, he’d dug up and replanted more plum trees than should have been required of any man and as far as he was concerned he’d never eat another plum.

He did, though. We all did. I no longer have the trees, but they outlasted my parents by many years. We had had flowers in the spring, fruit in the summer and a certain amount of amusement from those trees for a long time.

(Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column runs Thursday.)