The first American flag I remember seeing in my home had draped the coffin of my step-grandfather. Since he died when I was 2, I don't remember him. When I was a little older, however, my dad taught my brother and me how to raise that same flag in our front yard in the morning and how to lower and fold it into its tight triangle at dusk. We did this semi-faithfully for five years.

Then we moved to a house with no flagpole, and the custom faded. But the memory of that ritual walloped my heart many years later, when the triangle of the flag honoring my dad's Navy service was presented to my mother at my father's gravesite.

Email contributing columnist Valerie Schultz at vschultz22@gmail.com. The views expressed here are her own.