Decoration Day

"Golly" shared this poem nearly every May, often beginning with the words "It comes to mind  as Decoration Day approaches."

Month of bees and birds and song,
Summer soon be coming 'long.
If it comes on time we'd say
This is Decoration Day.

This is when we bring the flowers.
Fresh with heaven's dews and showers,
Monstrous big bouquets and grand,
Scatter them with loving hand.

Proper way to keep the day.
Proper, don't you think so, say?

Those lines and many more were written by Oliver Walcott Grimm who long ago went on to his reward. The man was a carpenter by trade who worked at times in Port Allegany, Galeton and Coudersport but he loved to write and he was fond of the smell of printer's ink.

We never did know that Longfellow man, and we missed out on Riley, the one-time itinerant Indiana sign painter, but we have a very pleasant memory of Oliver Walcott Grimm. Grimm would grind out verse as rapidly as Heinz could turn out pickles, and he was possessed of a quaint sense of humor.

"In the springtime, Gentle Annie
Trailing vines and flowers seeks.
Not so with Potter's Annie,
She goes searching after leeks."

Oliver Walcott Grimm was a character we are glad we knew. He was intelligent, sensitive, temperamental and his love of strong drink was probably the downfall which tended to shorten his life, causing death at an early middle age.  Regardless of his faults we admired him and we think of one teaching of the Elks – "The faults of our brother we write on the sands, their virtues on the tablets of love and memory."

If we knew where rested the remains of this one-time friend, it would please us very much to scatter a few flowers "with loving hand" on his resting place. We shall at least think of him, and most kindly, this Decoration Day.

I have accepted this challenge - all these years later - to know where rest the remains of Oliver Walcott Grimm so that I might be the one to remember with a scatter of flowers.