As The Day Went On, the Rain Came

When you live where you grew up, you go to memorial services with your mother, and you listen to your old friends talk about their mothers, who were your mother's old friends, and everyone weeps. You think about how when you and your old friends were children, playing, or running around with boys, your mothers were the age you are now, give or take some years, and you wonder if they felt as you and your friends do, at once beaten down by the constant press of children, work, life, the war, and daily exulting in the beauty of children playing and spring flowers. You think about how your mothers were all divorced, by then, or soon enough, from your fathers, but your friends, their daughters, are not divorced, or are long since divorced from first husbands left behind, and well settled into marriages that seem likely to stick, despite the constant press of frustration, of those children, jobs, life. You wonder if you and your friends are making your lives against or in honor of your mothers, and you decide it must be a lot of both.

Your friends are beautiful, and they speak beautifully of their mothers, and another old friend plays the saxophone, joyfully and mournfully, her mother beside her, carrying the saxophone case, as the mourners parade down the street.