J-Term Journal: Yellow-Ribboned

Driving through a rural, Midwestern community on a cold December Saturday, I scarcely recognized the place I used to call home.

My town had been transformed. Yellow ribbons adorned every streetlamp, tree trunk, and storefront. Small American flags fluttered resolutely in the front lawns of flower shops and nursing homes. Instead of listing cigarette prices, the sign outside the gas station at the corner of Main Street and Vine simply read, “We will never forget.”

He was a Marine, age 20, who had graduated from my high school a year before I did. I recall years past when we would both park in the front row—his vehicle of choice, a hulking white pickup truck, mine a tiny silver sedan—and exchange small talk as we walked the landscaped path to the school’s main entrance. I am hardly the only local to hold onto such a memory.

He died under fire in Afghanistan on the first day of reading period, just three days after his 20th birthday. Two weeks later, our community was fossilized in the throes of mourning. I thought I was prepared. I had heard the news via frantic phone calls and Facebook prior to J-term. Yet, reading the giant handmade banner above the icy state route, “OUR HOMETOWN HERO” spray-painted in red bubble letters, changed everything. Grades? Summer plans? Those were trivial matters. I grew up a little during that first commute home.

Later, I pieced together the aftermath. Word-of-mouth had recruited volunteers to prepare the yellow ribbons. Two thousand people had attended the visitation; our town’s population is only 1,817. Back in Cambridge, I had missed this exhibition of solidarity, the veterans and citizens who had lined the streets as a Marine escort brought the fallen soldier home, and the patriotic posters made by elementary school students that now papered the walls of the high school cafeteria where I used to dine regularly.

This didn’t matter. The tragedy’s impact was evident in 3,800 feet of yellow ribbon that bound a community together in grief. A  month later, as I prepared to leave home once again, every ribbon remained in place.