Apple Blossom Take One

Just this past weekend something epic took place.  Perhaps you live in a world that has never heard of a small-ish town in northwestern Virginia that prides itself on apples and being a suburb of the suburbs of DC, but that dot on the map is my hometown.

Friday morning I threw just about everything pink and green into a tiny little suitcase and headed to work.  I tried to stay on task.  I failed a little at staying on task.  At 1pm Papa H arrived in Old Town, pink shirt and all, met my boss and a coworker, and away the two of us went on 66W.


Night one of AB11 was the Fireman's Parade.  Thinking this was a small deal?  Think again

That's right - WORLD's largest Fire Fighter's Parade.  Big time stuff.

I was all dolled up for it too.  I had to take a pic of me in my pink and green to make J-Man more excited to leave work at regular time and battle Friday rush hour madness to make it.  So we snapped this one.  Strategically in front of pink blossoms.

Where I was sitting for the parade were all the usuals.  The people I look forward to seeing.  The teachers who cheer on DMMS like nobody's business.  The young man (with special needs?) who loooves this parade.  The owners of the house who still remember when I was a Little Maid with their daughter and had a luncheon in their backyard where we ate mud pudding with gummy worms.

There are also those I avoid each year. 'Nough said.

Across the street, there was a new lady in town.  She just moved in this year and apparently didn't get the memo that part of the fun of The Bloom is to invite people to your yard to share it with you.  Not just your dog.

Finally, after the 3rd Division blared their sirens above the cheers of the crowd, Papa H and I left to collect the rest of the troops.  Mama H resting up for the next day, Big Sis exhausted from her drive, J-Man probably lost somewhere along the way.  No, seriously, he was out Rte 50 somewhere he'd never been before.  Bless my dear husband.

We gathered all into the Retirement-mobile, which is a beauty of an SUV, and arrived near my high school.  Have you seen a (public) school in your life as pretty as this one?  Am I biased?  Maybe.  Does that change things? Nope!

We rested on the grass with retired teachers and their granddaughters happily around us.  We watched the anticlimactic but still enthralling fireworks.  We oohed and ahhed.  We zipped and zoomed with the seemingly- ADHD ones.  We giggled like we hadn't seen fireworks before.  And we looked around at the very end, like, was that it? What happened to the finale?  And J-Man made inappropriate jokes related to missing climaxes.

I was thinking, as I lay there, admiring my J-Man's freshly shaven head (which yes, Papa H, I did help to shave!) and the bursting heavens above, that it's the simple things in life.  The real basic joys that are the true bees knees of it all.  My J-Man.  The boom, boom, boom of fireworks.  Familiar places, and faces.  Fresh cut grass and sunshine.  Country ham and pop-up books.  A dress that makes me feel pretty.  A person who makes me feel loved.  A day that feels like the whole world stopped to say happy birthday to me.

The optimism of Friday carried me through.  It keeps carrying me.  And when I have some time to write about Saturday and Sunday and Monday and more, it will still be the moments like that, the ones that keep me and Big Sis sitting out front long after everyone else has retreated to warm cars or living rooms, that make the rest of the trials around us feel completely conquerable.