And we are home.

Which seems both so very ordinary and so strange.

Had a great visit with my parents while we were in Salt Lake: my mother-in-law had wanted her ashes  buried next to her daughter’s grave there.

Her brothers and some of their families would be able to attend that way (not to mention my folks).  There were people who’d retired there after careers in Washington, DC, and I had people re-introducing themselves to me who’d known me since I was born.  Who knew. Edna Lou, who said she’d worked for my dad (wow, that would have been, what, 1953?! ’54?) Wow.

And there was the doctor who–I asked Richard later, that was him, right? Yes–was a close family friend of my in-laws and my parents and to whom my in-laws took their daughter when she was a teenager for some diagnostic tests. She was given a contrast dye to scan her kidneys, in the hospital as I remember the story, and promptly went into anaphylactic shock. It took a team working hard to bring her back, and in that moment of relief as she came to, she looked up at this good man she knew from church and declared, “My dad’s a lawyer and” (with extra emphasis) “my brother’s 6’8″. You better watch it.”

Everybody in the room cracked up.

And here my Ft Worth sister-in-law was, with her three grown or nearly-grown kids.

Cousin Michelle, younger than me, is fighting breast cancer and it was not caught early. “This last year’s been real rough,” she told me.  Her husband looked around at the happy crowd at the luncheon, laughed at the toddler who played games with the cane with me and declared, “We need to all do this again. For a happy reason.”

This morning as we packed up the rental car to go, somehow it caught my attention and I found myself bending low for a closer look. I knew I would want a picture, but even with the fingerless gloves on knitted by (you know who you are, and thank you), it was too cold to pry everything open to get to my Iphone in the this inside the that. We needed to go.

There was tiny frozen rice everywhere: as if the wall of fog had shattered into perfect little frozen grains of it on the ground. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like it before and I’ve certainly lived in snow in my life. It was like the weather was trying to throw a wedding. Or perhaps wishing Michelle and her love a long and happy life together.

We were coming in for landing when my seatmate opened her window at last and I had a sudden moment of, wait, it looks like snow on the ground here, too?! But of course it was the late sun coming blindingly white off the waters of the San Francisco Bay.

We are home.

I filled the birdfeeder.

Things are so much the same and so different.