The home where I grew up happened to be on the route of the town's annual Memorial Day parade, which was a showplace for school bands, Boy and Girl Scouts and Campfire girls trying to stay in step, various elected officials, and always a group of WWII veterans marching along in their various uniforms, one of them with a special silk worm pin he wore reminding us that he had bailed out over Germany as a pilot and been a prisoner of war, a spirited old guy by then who always had a sort of sardonic grimace/smile. We always put out our flag and stood at the curb with neighbors and fellow towns people to watch, cheer, and salute the flag, unless we happened to be marching with one of the groups.
In later years, I went with my wife and her cousin and a different cousin's husband to decorate the family graves in three different cemeteries in Scotland County Missouri, family stretching well back into the 1800's. We visited with groups of others at the various sites. My wife's dad's grave was appropriately posted with a little American flag in honor of his Army service as a teenager during World War I in the trenches in France. My wife came with cut flowers for all the family graves. I drove the group around in a strange little Nissan cube station wagon we'd rented from the airport in St. Louis. Weather permitting, I'll fly our American flag, a ship sized flag, off our porch tomorrow and Monday.
I always put the flag out when I get up and "strike the colors" at sunset. It lives by the front door rolled up on its pole.
