The day before we flew back to Colorado, Monica, Enedina, and I stopped by Cate’s place at Spring Lake Village for a mid-afternoon visit.

The four of us spent a good three hours hanging out. Mom hadn’t had the chance to sit down and chat with Enedina up until then, so along with Cate letting us three know how life’s treating her-she’s hung up her ping pong paddle, thinks she’ll drive during daylight hours for another year, and has no qualms about using a walker to get around-she gently peppered Enedina with some questions of her own:  how’s life, how’s college, etc. Grandparent stuff.

Then mom, her walker leading the way, gave us a short tour of the Spring Lake Village campus. We ended up in what I’d call the coffee shop or café and raided the place for some snacks and drinks.

During our break, I asked mom about a couple photos I saw at her party at Anne Marie’s place a couple days earlier, one of her and my dad taken on the streets of Chicago before they were married; it has a noirish quality about it. The other showed her and her mother, Madge, squeezed  into an automated photo booth during a shopping excursion to Chicago she and grandma went on when mom was a teenager.

I sorta got caught up in the moment when mom was telling the story of how some guy must have snapped a photo on spec of her and dad walking along one evening in Chicago and didn’t record the conversation. However, I did manage to get it together in time to ask her about the snapshot of her and grandma and record her recollection of how this 3 x 2-inch photograph came to be.