It’s raining here in my fair city today — just another in a seemingly endless series of gray days over the last few weeks. I know this means spring is on its way … it just seems to be taking its time getting here.

I especially wanted sunshine this past weekend, because my mother was visiting from Maine and I wanted us to be able to do fun things in nice weather. Instead, we got a blizzard. And though we did do fun things after the snow stopped falling, we did them in gray, gloomy muck.

Oh well.

Our weekend, in addition to / in spite of being gray, was very fun and quite musical. During the storm we alternated shoveling excursions with painting projects in my house, and kept the tunes going the whole time. My mother, to my enormous delight, is in love with Cee Lo Green, so we played a lot of his latest record. I also played the Decemberists and Mumford & Sons for her, and got her to watch Elizabethtown — a movie I love for its music and interest in music as much as anything else.

And as we left a semi chi-chi restaurant on Friday night, and “Folsom Prison Blues” came through the speakers, my funny little mama danced her booty out the door. She wasn’t the only one enjoying a little Johnny either: In the few feet from our table to the exit, we passed two other diners singing along.

It was a lovely weekend all the way around, and made me wish (yet again) that I lived closer to my parents and could spend time with them more often. But since I couldn’t stow away in my mother’s car and head back to Maine with her, I just made sure she had the Cee Lo CD to help the long freeway miles pass more quickly.

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