Update from the wilds of East Texas

My mother's ashes are duly buried; we had dinner at a cousin's house and are now spending the night with my aunt. We are coming home early-ish tomorrow, so I will have time to get some GuildWars in, I hope.

Traffic in Houston was horrid. Apparently everybody in the world was going to Lake Conroe today, because once we finally got past there, it thinned out very abruptly. Luckily, we're not planning on coming back the same way we went - we went straight up I-45 today, because that's the direct route to get to my mother's hometown where the cemetery is, but from my aunt's house in Bryan it's easier to come back down highways 6 and 290. And we're leaving well before noon, so hopefully that will also help.

I would normally be bemoaning the time change, but lately my sleep schedule is so screwed up any that I'm not at all sure that switching to DST will make it any worse. It might even help. I can hope, anyway.

Art and I both wrote letters to my mother (Art said his was "more of a note") and we put them in the silk urn wrapper, along with a couple of things I found in her purse that I thought had particular meaning to her - one was a picture of Parker, her grandson; the other one was the Apostle's Creed, which may require a little more explanation. The thing is, she changed from Baptist to Methodist to Lutheran in the last 10 years or so of her life, and what you have to understand is that she had been a Baptist all her life, and Baptists don't say the Apostle's Creed. (Y'all know what I'm talking about, right? "I believe in the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth..." ? That.) Well, so she wanted to memorize it so she could say it along with everybody else, but for some reason she had a terrible time learning it. She would cut copies of it out of the church bulletin and places like that, and leave them strewn around the house. And she would make both me and Art quiz her on it. So when I found one of those copies, on a little strip of paper in her purse, I thought it seemed appropriate to put it in. Maybe, whereever she is, she'll find time to finally learn it.


Adding on to say that what I said in this entry - about how burying her ashes in the cardboard box from the funeral home might be the most environmentally sound option - turned out to be incorrect, because when I steeled my nerves and opened the thing up, there was a plastic box inside that, a fairly solid one, and pretty thoroughly sealed closed. I suppose we could have opened it if we had needed to (after all, what if we had wanted to scatter them?) but we didn't, really, so we left well enough alone. Funeral homes must have a standard size for these plastic boxes, becuase one was also sent along with the fabric urn, and the two were exactly the same size. So we just switched them out. She is buried in the plastic box from the funeral home with her name misspelled ("Stanley" instead of "Standley") with the beautiful silk wrapper that nobody will ever see again, in the plot next to my grandfather. My cousins dug a good-sized hole - about two feet square and two feet deep - in what we hope is the right place, and we took turns picking up handfuls of dirt to throw back in, and then when it was all filled back in, my aunt said a prayer (of course that's not my kind of thing, but it was my mother's kind of thing and that's what matters, right?) and that was it for the formalities. We did go wander around the cemetery, which is filled even more than I knew with great-aunts and uncles and distant cousins, not to mention my grandparents and great-grandparents on that side of the family. I think practically everybody in the cemetery was related to me to some degree. They could have some pretty good family dinners in that cemetery.