Hearing the old David Bowie song “Let’s Dance” (1983) the other day, took my mind back over 30 years (almost half my life).

The place was a dance studio in Danville where my twin nieces on my wife Diane’s side, Amanda and Lori, had been taking dance for several years. My daughter Rachel,then age 6, had already been studying dance for 2 years.

At the final dance show dress rehearsal, those beginning drum beats of the Bowie song were my cue to start videoing Amanda and Lori’s dance number, set to that song.

Amanda and Lori were also “horse” girls (“pony” girls, the ponies being “Spunky” and “Beauty”). Whenever hearing the Alabama song “Roll On 18 Wheeler”(1983) I think of Spunky and Beauty’s “horse” power, as Lori and Amanda competed in the 4-H Caswell County Horse Show. I filmed them with an “antique” video recorder, while “Roll on 18 Wheeler” played over the event’s loudspeaker (becoming that video’s “soundtrack,” just as “Lets Dance”(1983) became the “soundtrack” for their dance recital video).

Lori later played the flute in the Bartlett Yancey High Band, and was killed (age 17) at a Disneyworld street crossing in 1988 by a woman speeding to a hair appointment (sometimes, vanity is deadly).
Diane passed from the effects of a brain tumor (age 49).

Since Diane’s birthday is May 30th, my son Jeremy, daughter-in-law Rose, mother-in-law Doris, and I went to Hobby Lobby on Memorial Day weekend to purchase flowers to fix floral arrangements for Diane’s and Lori’s graves in the private family cemetery; yellow roses for Diane, and chrysanthemums for Lori. I bought Diane (in life) some beautiful china yellow roses years ago at Salisbury’s “Queen’s Candy Kitchen.”

Trees now partially obstruct the cemetery’s approach, but have not moved closer (like “Birnham Wood to Dunsinane”).

Doris insisted on her wheelchair being in the hot sun adjacent Diane’s (her daughter) grave, saying: “I need some sun!” (those of German descent do like to take some sun now and then).

In the unusual Spring heat, I thought of long-ago family Summer Sunday visits to Hyco Lake and Lori’s love of sweet tea with much lemon, in effect: “lemonade with a twist of tea!”

Diane’s embedded photograph looks out from her tombstone, as does Lori’s. As a child, I first saw one of these tombstone photographs in Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church Cemetery. I think the bespectacled, sandy-haired young man there was killed in a 1940s or 50s automobile wreck.

The quartz cobbles covering Diane’s grave are partially soil-sunken. Doris arranged for them, but they just might as well be “stones of remembrance” by Diane’s many first-grade pupils, some of whom I run into now and then, and who still speak highly of her in their adulthood.

Musical notes are carved on Diane’s tombstone, as she also played piano and taught school chorus.On Lori’s tombstone, a young girl is depicted playing a flute. And on Lori’s foot stone, a young girl rides a horse.

And also on Lori’s tombstone is placed a bronze plaque with two free-verse poems, one by my daughter Rachel, and one by me:

“Amidst all the springtime colors,
there is a love that outshines others.
This love cannot be separated by death, nor be sacrificed for life.
Although this life is shattered by death,this love will never end.
Thy beloved ones shall never forget her, and all the love she gave us.” — Rachel Williams

“In the light of a young spring sun,
shine many scattered patches of snow, cradled softly by blue shadows of hills and forests.
They linger as the random memories of one dear life,
not rushing forgotten in the flood of spring melt,
but trickling slowly, yet certain, to the heart.” —Mack Williams

Despite the passing of 31 years, that bronze plaque looks pristine, with still no oxidized covering of green patina.
But after all, bronze was always much more resistant to the elements than is the heart.