Thread by @AlexandraErin

I see skies of blue,
and clouds of white.
The bright blessed day
and the dark sacred night.

So this picture was taken on Honeymoon Island, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. I took it Saturday, during a brief break in the weather.

The kite was a gift from my mother, one Easter many years ago now, when she first started going to Honeymoon Island.

She gave each of us a kite in our Easter baskets. We were adults by this point, to be clear. The kite folds up and fits in a little travel pouch. She called it the world's easiest kite and said we had to try it in the gulf sea breeze, where it would fly with no effort at all.

What with one thing and another, I never made it to the beach with the pouch. I had never even opened the pouch before yesterday. My current eccentric adventurer aesthetic/lifestyle lends itself to pouch-based accessories, though.

So I took the kite with me out to the island, along with my little pocket spyglass, a wearable USB speaker, and one of the many seashells she collected in her beach walks, back when she could walk on the beach.

We stood there on the beach at near high tide, each holding a sea shell, and listened to Ashokan Farewell (an old sentimental favorite of hers) and What A Wonderful World (a personal signature song), silently reflecting.

Well, mostly silently. I did say "goodnight, dogs" in response to the line "the dark sacred night", which I had misheard once as a child.

When the music ended, we returned our three shells to the water, in the hopes that someone else might find them and in some sense carry her hobby forward.

(I am not accepting feedback on my symbolic gesture of mourning at this time, thank you.)

Then we flew the kite -- quickly, briefly, as the clouds were gathering at our back and if I died grieving her, my mother would kill me -- and used the spyglass to look at distant birds and boats, and across the way to Clearwater.

She never saw the spyglass, as I got it for WisCon and the last time I saw her was the week before that, but I think my mother would have appreciated it.

Boarding a plane now so I will put a pin in my thoughts for now.

But as of today, our family's private observances are over. I will be traveling later in the week for the larger memorial back in our first home in Nebraska.

Thank you everyone for your patience, support, and respect for our privacy in this time.

<3