Hello.

Each year on the seventeenth day of March I write a little slice about my grandmother. March 17 is the anniversary of her death in 1990. It was so long ago and yet when the day comes it feels closer. We are currently piano shopping and a wonderful store is in the same town as the cemetery where she is buried. She is joined there by her father and mother, my great-grandparents.

We had been talking about visiting the piano store on this particular weekend for a couple of weeks and I had not put two and two together until I woke up this morning.

"Hey, we should visit the cemetery today."

We all got into the car early this morning and made the drive. We tapped on and listened to several pianos all of which made me a bit teary, I miss my piano. Then we piled back in the car to make the short drive two miles down the road to the cemetery.

"Do you remember where it is?" Shawn asked as we got closer.
"Yes, it's been a while but we just need to stay to the left unless things have changed."

I was picturing the turns in the drive that mazed around the cemetery. I could see where the water spigots were in my mind because I often filled milk jugs when we would water the flowers. I wondered as I imagined. The dirt path, was it a road now, or still just dirt? As we pulled in it looked the same yet aged from greening moss. We slowly made our way to the back.

"Here, stop near the middle of this section, it's right up on that hill."

We got out and walked up to the three flat stones with urns on each side. The headstone nearby had somewhat recent flowers left behind. A neighbor from my mother's childhood who died too young. I talked to my kids about who we were visiting, when they died, what we did together when I was a child.

It was nice to visit and even nicer to visit today.