Remembrance Day

Eliza Hazel Johnson & Lilly Hazel Lewis with Poppies
Summer 2010, Camrose, Alberta, CANADA

November 11th arrives solemnly in the Northern Hemisphere, just as the wind becomes chilly and the skies morph into a cold grey.

It's a day for remembrance and is so named in Canada. It's the day the US and her neighbor to the north join the UK and other Commonwealth countries marking a moment of silence in honor of our veterans .... Pausing to celebrate a commitment. And, to remember the lives lost in the name of freedom.

Ironically, or maybe ideally, it was the day Mr Johnson's maternal grandfather, a stalwart veteran of not one but two branches of the military was laid to rest complete with a gun salute that pierced the still silence on that biting cold November day not quite a decade ago.

My brother and his wife are both in the United States Marine Corps. My grandfathers were both veterans and my paternal grandmother served in the Royal Canadian Air force, in an era where the world was connected with a common theme of loss and destruction.

American friends who have repatriated from China often write that dates like Independence Day and Memorial day, and also today's, when all the ones line up on the calendar page as if in salute . . . take on special meaning after living in Socialist (Communist) China.

For me this day is inseparable from the words of a poem my Dad would recite, one he learned in Grammar school, each Remembrance Day.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

In Flander's Field by John McCrae