Memorial Day highlights

A wet Memorial Day.

Sometimes life gives you opportunities that you never even thought possible. Like being able to spend a Sunday with both of your grandparents, decorating graves and hearing the family history one more time.

This is particularly miraculous because just two months ago, we thought we had lost my grandpa. And on Sunday he was walking around and cracking jokes and just having a good ol' time. I mean, whoa.

Actually, I guess that IS the highlight. We met my brother Tim and my parents and my grandparents' house, knocked out some rather eclectic bouquets assembly line style, and hit the road. We stopped at five different cemeteries, we saw where Gramps played high school football and where Gram lived when her family first came west from Wisconsin, and we heard all kinds of stories.

Like: My great great grandfather brought his family out west from Missouri, and then died less than a year later from pneumonia. His wife took the girls back home, but my great grandfather stayed.

It was fun.

Oh, and tangent alert, we had lunch at McDonalds, except I had packed a lunch for our little fam because I am kind of a poser when it comes to restaurants, plus I'm back on the no processed food train (unless you count that chocolate I recently purchased... but it's fair trade organic and high in cacao content, so it's basically a health food. Eric says it tastes like bark). My grandparents couldn't really understand why we would choose to eat sandwiches and carrot sticks instead of cheeseburgers and fries, but they think everything I do is awesome so it wasn't that big of a deal. And hey, McDonalds came through for me in a big way--they gave me a coffee in my reusable mug with steamed milk from their espresso bar and acted like it was no big deal when I was trying to explain my food allergies and how a Frappe wasn't really in my future. And since this was a small town with no other coffee options, I really appreciated this small act of kindness.

Johanna can make a bouquet out of anything.

And one more tangent except kind of not really, Johanna would pick whatever little flowers she could find growing up from the ground in every cemetery we visited and would place the little daisies or buttercups or dandelions or whatever on the graves near where we were, whether we knew who was buried there or not. Since these were fairly old cemeteries we were visiting for the most part, those were the only flowers some people got.

She's a sweetheart.