Memorial Day at Jarmans Gap
A reflection from the foothills of the Blue Ridge
Jarmans Gap, May 2026
Our farm sits in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia. Ground that has seen its share of grief in American history. Men from this county and the surrounding counties, including Bedford, which lost nineteen sons in the first minutes on Omaha Beach, marched off to wars they did not fully understand and did not come back. Some of them were nineteen. Some left wives and small children. Some had never been more than thirty miles from the farm where they were born before a call to duty.
I think about them when I walk the fence line in the morning. They came up on their own, as they tend to do every May, along the fence line where the pasture sprawls westward to the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains at Jarmans Gap. Thin-petaled, almost translucent, with a particular red that commands my attention like a sentinel standing at its post. Not the red of fire or of warning signs. But a blood-orange red, tussling in the wind, reverently honoring every man and woman who made the ultimate sacrifice.
I did not always know what they meant. Ten years ago, I was passing through London, through Paddington Station, when an older gentleman with a small poppy pinned to his lapel stopped me. A veteran himself, honoring the fallen the way his generation knew how on that day, standing at a busy station, offering red poppies to strangers moving past him. Most of them did not stop. But I stopped.
I stretched out my arm, and he placed one in my hand without much ceremony. We did not exchange many words. But something passed between us, one serviceman to another, that I have not forgotten. I can still picture the face of that older gentleman.
After boarding my train, I looked up the significance of the poppy pin. And I have not walked past a poppy the same way since.
I had the privilege of serving in the Marine Corps, both active and reserve, including Desert Storm. I know what it is to stand alongside men you would trust with your life, because you did trust them with your life, and they trusted you with theirs. Some of those men are gone now. Not all of them died in combat. But some did. And on a day like this, they are not abstractions. They are more than “those who died in service.” They are fellow Marines, sailors, soldiers, and airmen, deserving to be remembered with dignity.
A Canadian physician, John McCrae, understood this. Belgium, spring of 1915. He worked at a medical outpost while men were buried in the field beside him. As poppies were pushing up through the fresh ground, he wrote seventeen lines about what he saw.
In Flanders Fields
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.
My wife’s aunt sent us a bag of poppy seeds not too long ago. She knew I appreciated them. I have not planted them yet. But this fall, I will. Around Veterans Day, I will scatter them across the adjacent field. All of them. And when they come up next May, there will be another field of red along the fence line where the pasture sprawls westward toward Jarmans Gap …