Yes, I believe it is . . .  So, uh, well, hi.

This is Flowerama in Iowa City as LZP approached for the Harmony Cemetery trip.

This is a picture of Flowerama from their website. Sydney would have to sleep for two days after sniffing all these displays.

Yes, I am not finding any movies on the cable channels that I want to have on in the background. I was busy these past few days showing support for the Memorial Day Marathon; I’ve been on subs, on carriers, on destroyers, on battlegrounds and sitting in the cooler throwing a baseball at a wall. I’ve watched a lot of soldiers – from Errol Flynn and David Niven and John Wayne to Matt Damon.

I have “Kwai-ed” with Alec Guiness and William Holden. And seeing William Holden reminded me to go and tell Der Bingle something I had read: “Did you know Audrey Hepburn was going to marry William Holden following the filming of Sabrina but found out he had had a vasectomy and so called it off?” Der Bingle seemed not impressed and I did a U-turn and headed Back to Bataan, literally.

But tonight, no background dialogue. Oh, what to do? Say, wait, didn’t I rent Valkryie from Redbox today? Why yes I did. So time to call Mother and then settle down with my blanket and the remotes.

LZP went down on Friday and said, “We remember” at the cemetery where his father and grandparents and uncle are buried. And he sent these pictures to his brother, Der Bingle.

This is where Der Bingle’s grandparents rest – Lydia and William A. Vance Sr. Liddy and W.A., that’s what their contemporaries called them. I have her dishes now in my dining room, and a picture of them on one of their anniversaries back before I knew them. And a picture of them at their 50th – and a picture of Liddy in Der Bingle’s face . . . he looks so much like her.

And here are the flowers for William A. Vance Jr. – their dad.

And then Uncle Joe and Aunt Ruth:

Sydney has it in his head I should be up at about, oh, somewhere around six thirtyish in the morning. And he thinks then he should go back to bed. I guess he has heard me say that I like the sunlight of mid-summer early mornings when the whole day stretches out ahead of you, fresh and ready to be lived . . . and the house is quiet. But, Sydney, it’s cloudy this morning . . . and I clearly explained I wanted to just lie with my head cuddled down under the blanket some more. Of course, Sydney feels he knows what is best for me, so I am up, as in UP. He, by the way is napping.

I’m here on the corner of the sofa with my feet stretched out along the cushions and my laptop on my, well, lap. Checking the news and looking into iphoto.

This is a field of mustard grass (I think) in Fountain County. At this time of the year, quite a few fields look like this around Kingman during Memorial Day week. I think it’s lovely – these big open expanses of yellow lying close to the Wabash River. But wait, I just realized they ARE yellow, just like the armies of dandelions I have been fighting. But, look, they don’t have those awful ugly dandelion leaves that drive me crazy. And, probably, when their blooms fail, they don’t make the whole area look like a derelict yard of puffballs. You have to admit dandelions in the puff ball stage look like nature’s dust bunnies.

But enough of that. We ate lunch in Veedersburg at the Bus Stop, the same place we ate last year. I feared then maybe there would not be enough business to keep them going, but I was wrong. I had to circle the block to find a place to park and they have a professional new menu, all shiny and everything.

And a rustic screen door showing through the window of an aged heavy door painted orange. I’m rustic . . . and my new hair color is showing a bit of orange as well, so I guess I fit in okay.

Now, here is my cousin, Susie. Most people call her Sue now, but to me she will always be Susie.

She had a story to tell on herself. Seems she needed to call a member of her family and so punched the name on her cell phone. Well, she could hear the connection being made and then her house phone started ringing so she had to hang up. But she got there too late and whoever had called had hung up. So she waited awhile and then called again; the same thing happened. At this point I asked how many times this happened and she said “Five” and I thought, “We’re related.” She was accidentally calling herself, of course.

Oh, here’s a picture of my great-grandparents grave in the same cemetery where my dad is buried.

I suppose it might seem morbid to some, this posting of a gravestone, but hey they’ve been dead a long time and it was in the natural order of things. He was in the Civil War and, look at his birthday . . . I was born just shy of what would have been his hundredth birthday. Actually, there’s a continuity about it: he’s buried where he son lies, and his grandson and now his great-granddaughter is coming to see his grave. My cousins, Susie, Glenda and Ann are in the same boat – their mother, my dad’s sister Mary, is buried in that cemetery too.

Now I have to go transfer the pictures my husband’s brother (LZP)  sent from Harmony Cemetery in Illinois, just east of the Mississippi River. LZP, you will remember, is the instigator behind the dandelion resistence and has included a picture of where he gathered the flowers for Harmony . . . It was Flower-ama. I don’t know . . . the name just struck Der Bingle and me as funny.

See ya.

I have much to tell about my trip to Kingman, but I’ll wait until the next post to do, or maybe the one after that – stories of the Bus Stop restaurant and lunch with my cousins and little quirks of the trip. But right now here is one video. The sun was warm, the breeze soft and refreshing and songs of birds in the background. My father always marveled that I was not particularly interested in listening to the different songs, or in listening at all. Since his death, I have been much more alert to their tones. I was there Thursday, Daddy, and I listened. And I missed you.

This is where I’ll be going Thursday morning come dawn:

This is where my father is buried, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. The man who taught my father to play Euchre, an Indiana tradition for those of us who came before video games, is there too, not far from Daddy’s grave. The old part in the right of the picture is filled with the old markers that don’t show up too well in faraway photos. My great-grandparents are in that section, way over to the far right. My father is on the left end of the left loop, next to his parents, When he died, we took him home.

Thursday morning I will have a large urn in the car, seatbelt around it to hold it steady as I follow the secondary roads he preferred. And a couple of jugs of water . . . and a single geranium to place on the inset patio square that protects Miss Alice’s ashes.

My mother and I have been making the trip every Memorial Day since 2000. She would drive down and I back . . . and she would sit there like a crash dummy in her seat, bracing for the accident that would claim both our lives and leave the estate in a mess or the fender bender that would cause need for a wrecker and a rental car and maybe band-aids. There were times I considered just driving into a ditch and ending her anxiety: “Okay, Mother, you can stop worrying about something happening now.”

There were times when I took  pictures of the backs of the trucks we would get stuck following for miles. We would take the old two lane roads she and my father took back in the 40’s and 50’s. I remember those trips from a backseat view – in a two door coupe so I couldn’t accidentally fall out a back door. Sometimes my father would tease me by asking if I wanted to go through Yeddo, a name I found funny.

Here’s Yeddo:

And here’s a picture of the country store courtesy of a flicker participant:

*****

WELL . . . this is a delayed continuation of the trip to the cemetery story. For the first time, Mother has decided not to go, to send me alone. I think it will be better like that – the trip is hard on her for she has become more anxious about things going awry in these past years.

So, Sydney is staying at Scott with Mother and Tiffany and the outdoor cat; I will go by myself and I will probably go extra miles just to be able to use the interstates and not worry about negotiating the scores of turns, stop lights, one-way streets and slow cars.

And at the cemetery I won’t have to worry about upsetting Mother by shedding some tears . . . because I so loved my daddy.