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The 4th grader says he'd give his poppy to his grandpa. His grandpa drove army tanks. His grandpa is dead. He'd bring the poppy to the grave.
It's Friday morning at Marblehead Village School. On the strip of lawn to the school's front entrance, and 4th and 5th graders kneel in the grass and push 1,807 handmade paper poppies into the ground, stem by stem, until the field grows red. They haven't made the poppies. Small American flags rise between them. Behind the children stands the school. In front lies the road and the long weekend.
The long weekend is not a long weekend. It's a four-day observance that opened this morning with a veterans breakfast at the Council on Aging. The school staking comes next, then cemetery flagging, a Sunday VFW ceremony and Monday's parade to Memorial Park, where the town's honor roll will be read. "In Flanders Fields" will be read again that afternoon at Waterside Cemetery. A VFW barbecue closes the weekend.
The poppies come from upperclassmen. They've been cut from paper and glued to popsicle sticks by 6th-grade teacher Kate Deeley's class — 42 students — over weeks of a poetry unit that ends each year, as it does this year, with "In Flanders Fields," the 1915 poem by Canadian physician and soldier John McCrae. This morning Deeley's 6th graders are down at Bornedale, an outdoor education program, and the job of taking their work out to the lawn falls to the 4th and 5th graders, joined by a handful of 6th graders who stayed back. Deeley has been running the project for seven years. Last year her class made about 1,300 poppies. This year they've made 1,807.
There is a reason the number climbs.
"We've been trying to get the number of veterans from Marblehead who died," Deeley says. No one has produced a tally. So every year the class tries to exceed the last. "I have a very competitive class. They're incredibly sweet, and they just wanted to do as many as they could."
She started the project to honor her grandfather, Paul Williams McDaniel, a Korean War Navy veteran she remembers as "a most gentle, kind, intelligent man." Her other grandfather also served in the Navy. The unit covers metaphor, simile, imagery, tone and mood; students have to identify the figurative devices in McCrae's poem before they begin a single flower. "You can say so much more with a metaphor," Deeley says.
McCrae wrote the poem in April 1915, after 17 days tending the wounded in Belgium and the death of a close friend. The poppies, in the poem, grow between the crosses, row on row. After the poem traveled, an American academic on leave from the University of Georgia named Moina Michael campaigned to make the flower a symbol of American remembrance. A century later, a 6th-grade class in Marblehead is still answering her.
The children come out in waves. Two or three times across the morning, a fresh group files out of the school and heads for the lawn, and each time the veterans stop them before they can kneel — shaking hands, saying thank you, talking to them one at a time. Then the kids get to work.
Carl Titus, a Marine who enlisted out of high school and went to Vietnam, sits on a brick-framed garden bed at the edge of the lawn and watches the children kneel. "When I look at these kids, I'm a little bit older, I say to myself, 'My God, they're still kids, and that's kind of what we were when we went in,'" he says. He thanks the kids, and thanks the adults who have taught them. "That's where it starts," he adds.
Out on the lawn, one of those kids is 5th grader Luke Taylor. If his papa were still alive, Luke says, he'd give him a poppy. His papa was a Marine sniper in Vietnam.
When the third wave arrives, Ronnie Knight, commander of Marblehead VFW Post 2005, stands before the 4th graders fanned out in front of him. He says last year's display drew elderly veterans to the lawn after dark. A lot of them came at night to see it, he says, and wept. The poppy, for him, means one thing: "Our service is not forgotten. No matter when it was, no matter where it was."
5th grader Raymond Varei, asked what he'd tell a kid from another town who walked up to the display, gives essentially Knight's speech back: it's for the veterans who "passed away and died for the country."
Rich Connolly, also a veteran, keeps returning to the children. "It's great that the town is getting the kids involved in like what Memorial Day is all about," he says. "There's a lot of people that never get to come home, so that's really what this is for."
Taegn Thompson, in 5th grade, is one of those kids. She'd give her poppy to her dad's girlfriend's father — the only veteran she knows. What the children keep saying, when asked, is appreciation.
Roseann Trionfi-Mazzuchelli, the town's veterans agent and an Army veteran herself, sits next to Titus, watching the staking continue. "We're not here for the barbecues … We're here to honor our brothers and sisters, my brothers and sisters who are not here to be with us right now in person, but they're here in my heart."
Before the project, 4th grader Jack DeFoto thinks Memorial Day and Veterans Day are one and the same. Many of his classmates think so too. Many of them also think the day is meant to be a happy one.
If a child from another school or town visited the memorial, 4th grader Andrew Sides says he'd simply thank them.
Why?
"Because they're supporting our veterans," he says.
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