MOTHER'S DAY or MOTHERING SUNDAY - NANCY

We go often to Jardines Los Valle, to visit Nancy's grave. Sunday 18th March is Mother's Day in England and in Kenya, so today we travelled over to Los Chillos, cleaned up the humble, little gravestone and put in some new flowers, including one red rose each from John, Robbie and Maia. Here are some photos for the record.

We clean the stone with a little toothbrush and replace the flowers always with what in England might be called Lesser Stitchwort - a hedge plant with inflorescences of small white flowers. Lesser Stitchwort is John's favourite wild flower.



      

Nice photo of Robbie, with his red rose.

This photo was kindly taken for us by one of the cemetery gardeners.







Jardines Los Valles is a very beautiful and peaceful place for a cemetery. There are many big palm trees in the gardens. The management allowed us to plant a special Honey Maple tree during the funeral in 2008. The tree has memories - just before Nancy died we had planted 10 Honey Maples in our garden in Arenal. The tree, which is growing strongly, is alongside the road on the very left of the picture.






Nancy's small gravestone. Behind are the Mother's Day roses and the ' Lesser Stitchwort'. 










A story with a lighter note to the sombreness of a cemetery: Friends in John's school looked after all the bureaucratic complications immediately after Nancy's death. One result of this was the purchase of a burial plot, enough for three people in Jardines Los Valles. John always thought this was a horizontal space - that we would all be buried comfortably side-by-side. A new little grave appeared very close beside Nancy's, last year. On inquiry, it turned out that our three person space is vertical - one on top of the other! That is certainly comfort!