Wreaths of remembrance Maine evergreens adorn Arlington headstones

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Doesn’t it make you proud just to be from Maine?” Diane Peva asked a total stranger as she wiped away tears from under her glasses. Realizing they were both wearing sweat shirts embroidered with the state name, the two embraced.

It was just after 8 a.m. Thursday and a thick fog enveloped the hills in the southern part of Arlington National Cemetery, where more than a hundred people gathered at the tail end of a truck carrying 5,000 evergreen wreaths adorned with red bows.

“Oh, smell them!” Peva said as the truck’s back door was pulled up and hundreds of boxes of wreaths were emptied.

Two assembly lines were formed to unload the truck, and within two hours almost every wreath was resting at a headstone in the memorial section of the cemetery.

“Certainly we know why we’re here,” said Wayne Harrington of the Maine State Society, a Washington, D.C.-area group of displaced Mainers that helps organize the event each year.

“As you place the wreath, this is a time to remember,” Harrington told the group before its members began distributing the wreaths. “Take time to look at the name. Most of these people don’t have visitors any longer.”

Peva and her husband, Jim, of Surry, each took a wreath and ventured into the rows of white headstones. Down on one knee, Peva leaned the wreath up against the headstone. She straightened the red velvet bow and ran the palm of her hand over the engraved name, pausing slightly. She wiped the top of the headstone and stood up.

“Take a moment, turn around, and just look at what you’re doing,” said a volunteer upon learning it was Peva’s first time helping lay the wreaths.

The two did, and what they saw were rolling hills of white gravestones, all adorned with green wreaths out of the generosity of one man.

For the past 15 Decembers, Morrill Worcester, owner of Worcester Wreath Co., located in the small coastal town of Harrington in Washington County, Maine, has donated wreaths to be laid at headstones in the cemetery. This year, in addition to the ones donated to Arlington, a half-dozen wreaths were laid at each of 230 veterans cemeteries and monuments spread out over all 50 states.

When the project first began there were barely 10 volunteers, said Lewis Pearson of the Maine State Society. Each year more people began to help. Last year about 100 volunteers turned out, but this year by the time the wreaths were being put out more than 500 people from across the nation came to lend a hand.

Each year the wreaths are laid in a different section of the cemetery. This year the wreaths were set 150 yards from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, upon headstones in the memorial section, which honor those whose bodies were never recovered.

The annual Arlington Cemetery Wreath Project blossomed this year into Wreaths Across America after a photo of Worcester’s wreaths resting against gravestones on a snowy day was mass e-mailed around the world.

Since then, Worcester has received more than 7,000 e-mails, and media outlets from as far away as Australia, Germany and Japan were present for this year’s event.

“It’s gone worldwide,” Pearson said. “It’s unbelievable.”

This year was also the first year that the truck delivering the wreaths was joined by the Patriot Guard Riders, a group of motorcyclists who honor fallen soldiers.

Bunny O’Leary and John O’Leary of Norway, Maine, and Joe Pepin, of Mount Chase, Maine, were the only three riders who followed the truck the entire 750 miles from Harrington to Arlington.

They were cheered the entire way down, said Bunny O’Leary, and people waved flags and clapped for the truck, on whose side sprawled a photo of wreaths and the words “Remember – Honor – & Teach.”

“The riders were with me all the way,” said Bill Stembergh of Jonesboro, Maine, who drove the truck. “We picked up more and more every state we passed through.”

Stembergh usually makes the drive in one day, he said, but this year the group took U.S. Route 1 instead of Interstate 95 in order for hundreds of motorcyclists to join, lengthening the trip to four days.

The O’Learys and Pepin were originally planning on following the truck to Rhode Island, but each time they made a pit stop, they decided to go a little farther.

“I told Morrill, ‘I just can’t go home yet,’ and Morrill said, ‘You may never go home now,'” said John O’Leary. “We just couldn’t leave him.”

“There were a lot of wet eyes,” said his wife. “It’s been hard for tough bikers.”

This was also the first year the Civil Air Patrol participated, coordinating the wreath laying in all 50 states.

“Seeing veterans and meeting them was really an honor,” said Patrick Lappin of Calais, Maine, an airman first class in the cadet program of the Civil Air Patrol. “I will pass this story on to my children.”

This was Lappin’s second time participating in the wreath-laying ceremony. The event is personal for him, he said, because he lost two relatives in World War II, one at Pearl Harbor and the other at Normandy.

By the time wreaths were being laid at Sen. Edmund S. Muskie’s gravestone, the USS Battleship Maine monument, the Kennedy family memorials and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the sun had scorched off the fog to produce an unusually warm December day.

Morrill Worcester, the man whose love of Arlington National Cemetery began when he won a trip to Washington as a 12-year-old paperboy for the Bangor Daily News, took another moment on Thursday to reflect on the event. He looked out at the endless rows of gravestones, hundreds of volunteers and thousands of wreaths.

“They came here because they wanted to be here,” he said. “It just shows the importance of what we’re doing.”

He added: “You and I wouldn’t have what we have today without these buried here. Every one of these people is why we are here.”