Día de los Difuntos

Here's Pat D'Andrea's wonderful image of the Suchitoto cemetery on All Soul's Day, el día de los difuntos. Everyone in the town carried flowers, both real and artificial, to the cemetery, where they spruced up the gravesites and painted the tombs and attended Mass. Blue, pink and green are among the favorite colors for tombs, and the flowers are all the colors possible plus a few that aren't. With the cemetery full of Suchitotans visiting, praying, working and full of the colors and life they brought with them, this was a wonderfully cheerful sight. Outside the cemetery gates flowers and food were for sale, and the party continues tonight on the plaza.

I thought about my family, whose graves can be found in three Western states and many different cities. We could never have this kind of gathering of the living and the dead. It's something we lost when we moved away from the small towns my parents were born in.

I said something in my last blog post about the beginning of summer - today I learned from Marta, my new Spanish teacher in the Pajaro Flor Escuela de Lenguajes (and a different person from Martha, who's been mentioned in this blog), that it always rains on November 1st and November 2nd, and that's the end of the rainy season. Indeed it did rain yesterday, and looks like raining tonight. We'll see what tomorrow brings.