We went back to North Carolina last week for something of a family reunion (saw way more family than the couple of folks I managed to snap pictures of), and to do some memorial things for Bill's mom who died in December. We visited the small town where she grew up and put flowers on the family graves and bought Mabel ice cream at the soda shop where her great grandparents first met in the 1920s. What I found caught my eye in the midst of this sad occasion were the moments of whimsy, surprise, and absurdity. The flowers in the hotel bathtub, the carousel ostrich, the awesome wordy sign on the Unitarian church bathroom, Bill and Mabel playing on the real old caboose a that park that Bill loved as a child, and the incredibly badly drawn baby in a life jacket on the airplane safety card (Mabel adores reading airplane safety cards, complete with details about crashing into the water versus crashing into the land, etc.), as well, again and again, as the astonishingly beautiful signs of incipient true East Coast Spring that abounded around every corner--the flowering trees, and the trees just starting to show the faintest mist of green tiny pale green leaves.
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