We live across the street from a cemetery. Every spring, the flags appear in preparation for Memorial Day.

It’s an old cemetery. The veterans there mostly fought in the American Revolution and the Civil War. A couple of years ago, when I was out walking one morning, I met two young men putting the flags in place. They were carefully studying each headstone, worried about missing one. We talked for a while and I learned that up until that year they had an older man working with them who knew exactly where all the flags had to be placed.

Shortly after I moved up here, we were walking in deep woods out past Barnard in early summer. There in a small clearing was a small cemetery. It had a forlorn, abandoned appearance and yet the grave of each veteran was marked with a flag. Just like across the street from my house. Just like at Arlington National Cemetery.