Recycled plastic bottle flower.
Within one-fourth of a mile on a popular wooded trail, two memorial benches made of recycled plastic have recently been installed.
I love recycled plastic benches.
A bench would not have suited my mother, though. She liked the indoors.
My mother died a few years ago and is buried next to my grandparents in the Catholic cemetery in her hometown.
Graves mattered to my mother. On Memorial Day for forty years, she decorated my grandparents’ graves. She used plastic flowers.
If she liked plastic flowers, she liked them. Who cares? She bought them at Ben Franklin’s and Hobby Lobby. They were everywhere in her house for a couple of years. She needed to collect things after my father began to cheat.
It is not easy to find plastic flowers in my hometown anymore. First we tried the Hy-Vee. The garden center had some beautiful plants.
We found plastic at Flowerama.
Someone had already decorated my grandparents’ grave. My poor mother’s was bare.
I wiped off the bird shit.
I stuck the vase of plastic flowers behind the gravestone.
Oddly, I felt her presence as I honored her with petroleum products.
Pulvis et umbra sumus.
Next year: recycled plastic flowers!
mirabile dictu 
The last time I went to Ohio I visited my parents’ graves and felt mostly sadness. They are in the sort of genteel cemetery where the markers are flat to the ground and there is no place to put anything to show that I was there. How good that you could leave something your mother would have liked.
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It was my mother’s custom, and it’s too bad there is no one to do this year-round. Yes, some cemeteries are much prettier than others!
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