Here comes the parade
Last Saturday was a stay-at-home-and-read-a-book-with-a-cup-of-something-warm-in-your-hands sort of day. It was the kind of damp cold that goes straight to your bones and chills your toes so that they don't get warm for the rest of the day. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good parade-watching day.
And yet, there we were, lined up outside the library on Church Street, umbrellas in hand, peering down the street and waiting for the sirens to indicate that the parade had started. This is what you do, apparently, when your daughter is walking with her Girl Scout troop in the parade: you get out of your warm slipper socks and don your raincoat so that you can jump up and down and wave emphatically for the five seconds it takes for her to walk by and grin at you.
Just before the parade started the rain turned to a drizzle, more annoying than drenching but still unpleasant. Up and down the street there were parents and families and the hardiest of holiday revelers, all huddled together for warmth under the gray, oppressive sky.
