Blue Skies

Of course it poured today; one of the schmaltzy books I loved as a kid had the line, "it's always raining the day you bury someone you love."   

66W was treacherous; 29S was slippery.  15 was, well... 15 is always winding and somewhat dangerous, but also tremendously familiar-- 15 is only as bad as the driver in front of you.  I was armed with things for everyone-- extra tissue packs, a printout of the poem Joji would read, a hymnal for my mother, a curling iron.  I didn't have the final copy of the obituary, which was my reading assignment.    

I found a copy, at my mother's direction, on the table in the kitchen nook.  There were proofs of the version to be distributed tomorrow.  My uncle JB's unerring eye picked so many good pics!  One is of Gramma, alone, dressed in white, hand on hip, somewhere in Abidjan.  She has on what she and my Nana would've called "dungarees", a white cotton shirt, a pair of sandals, and big sunglasses.  She looks both apprehensive and self assured in it; I know that sounds weird. 

Another is her smiling and talking on the phone; legs crossed, she's wearing a romper/bathing suity fifties era thing, and her grin is huge.  It's a very young version of my gramma and she looks how I suppose my mother remembers her looking.  Another photo is her as a baby-- if it didn't have the fuzzy quality of 20's era photography you would assume it was my aunt Mary Ann.   Yet another photo was completely startling to me-- my grandmother looks over her shoulder at the lensman (grandaddy, natch) and the look on her face is startling.

I can see my mother and each of my aunts in her face.  In fact, the whole expression recalled my aunt Buffa immediately, but it was weird to see everyone else sort of sitting there, as well, in her face.  It's also startling because it's such a familiar look-- tense, questioning, interested, annoyed, something... anything.  

Anyway, I know it's annoying to read it and not see it, but I didn't have a scanner so no go on the pix.  

Maybe at a later date.