remembrance weekend

Today marks the one year anniversary of my mom's death. I wanted to go up to Mt. Lemmon and sail a paper airplane into a canyon, but my ankle this morning was telling me to keep it simple, so we did: Mark and I went to the Tucson Botanical Gardens, a favorite spot of mom's, and we read some poems from a book that belonged to her parents, with marked passages in poems by Robert Burns, William Cullen Bryant, Lord Byron and William Wordsworth. Several of the poems I recalled hearing from my Grandparents and most of them had wisdom that would speak to an agrarian community, such as my Grandparents' and mom's childhood years. Two or three spoke of life and death, and, in their verses, encouraged a stalwart stoicsim that I believe I witnessed in my Grandparents Dice and in mom.

We sat in the Mexican Garden area of TBG, one of my favorite shady places within this urban oasis and watched a red male cardinal pick seeds from the earth. Butterflies shook their wings at us as they drank nectar from crepe myrtle. It was lovely and I really felt mom's presence in that space.

Yesterday we took Dad out to the food court at Park Place. Young families were bustling about with bags from Old Navy, filled, I suspect, with clothes for youngsters getting ready for school that starts next week. Dad really enjoys watching the children run about and feels connected to the young soldiers in Air Force or Army uniforms. He eats his pizza with gusto and although it's no town square we are visiting, there is a sense of community in the retail mall that reassures participants that life has continuity as babies are fed in their strollers and toddlers romp on the small playground inside a air-controlled desert shopping mall.

It's not easy in our secular world to find public places with meaning, but, if our hearts are open, they can be found. I am grateful, that on this weekend of remembrance, I found mine.