A butterfly fluttered among the trees of a rain forest in Brazil. At the same moment in Mexico City, Matilde Calderón y González lay dying.
Was it the imperceptibly small turbulence of a single butterfly’s wing in the humid air of the Amazon rainforest that set in motion a cascade of effects that culminated in a massive rainstorm over West Texas?
Whatever was its ultimate cause, there was a 16-inch downpour on the Pecos River basin that caused one of the Rio Grande’s great floods of the 20th Century. The river crested in Laredo at 52 feet. The floodwater destroyed the Mexican end of the railroad trestle and overwhelmed the International Bridge.
As the rain started falling on Texas, 800 miles to the south in Coyoacán, Matilde Calderón’s cancer had spread. The doctor told her three anxious daughters waiting outside the bedroom that they should get word quickly to their younger sister in Detroit. It was time for her to come home. Their mother was dying.
It was the last week of August 1932.
Matilde Calderón’s married name was Matilde Calderón de Kahlo, and the faraway daughter in the U.S. was Frida.
The telegram about her mother reached Frida Kahlo in Detroit on September 3. She would find out later that it was one of the last telegrams to cross the river border from Mexico that Saturday. The next morning, she and her friend Lucienne Bloch caught the Wabash Cannonball to St. Louis. From there they planned to take the Sunshine Express to San Antonio, catch the Texas Eagle to Laredo where they would board the waiting Áquila Azteca for the last leg of the trip to Mexico City. In 1932, even on express trains the trip took three days.
It was the Sunday before Labor Day. Four days earlier Kahlo, Bloch, and their husbands had stood in 100° heat on a rooftop in Detroit and looked up through squares of smoked glass at the near-total eclipse of the sun.
It had been a wretched summer for Frida Kahlo. In April she had followed Diego Rivera from San Francisco, a cosmopolitan city with a mild climate not that different from the one of her childhood in the Valley of Mexico, to Detroit, an ugly, too-cold or too-hot, boom town where manufacturing was the civic religion and smoking factories its cathedrals. A complacent philistinism with unselfconsciously expressed antisemitism passed for culture in the parlors of the industrialists, and Prohibition had yet another year of joy killing left in it.
If the earlier commission for a socialist like Rivera to paint a mural for the brokers of the San Francisco Stock Exchange had been an improbable irony, his next two commissions, the first at the Detroit Institute of Arts and the second at the new Rockefeller Center in New York, were right out of Alice in Wonderland. It is a wonder that any of these anti-capitalist murals were ever painted in the first place. Only one of them survived the displeasure of Rivera’s patron, John D. Rockefeller.
While Rivera was looking to épater les bourgeois in frescoes and mocking the plutocrats who were paying his bills, the matrons of Detroit society were snubbing a 25-year-old, unconventionally beautiful, omnisexual, flamboyant Mexican woman of folkloric clothes, advanced ideas, left-wing politics, and enormous artistic ambition. Besides, her English was dreadful. During the long hours Rivera was at work on the murals, Frida spent her time alone in their rooms at the Wardell Hotel across the street from the Institute of Arts.
And she was pregnant.
Kahlo had an uneasy relationship with pregnancy — to say the least. A gruesome streetcar-bus accident in Mexico City when she was an 18-year-old student had impaled her on an iron bar and broken her collarbone, ribs, leg, back, and pelvis. She would be bedridden in a torso cast for nine months of convalescence and live with lingering pain from these injuries for the rest of her life. With so many physical issues, doctors had advised her not to risk a pregnancy. She’d already survived one abortion and wavered that April and May, unable to decide whether to go on with the pregnancy or not. Uncharacteristically for such a strong-minded woman, Kahlo decided by not deciding.
On the 4th of July she was three-and-a-half months pregnant. With bands marching by outside and the fireworks’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Kahlo collapsed with a sudden life-threatening hemorrhage. In the Henry Ford Hospital, doctors saved her life but not the pregnancy.
Characteristically for this artist who dared to blur the line between life and art by making herself both the subject and the object of her painting, the pain of the miscarriage led to the gestation of a different progeny. Kahlo began work immediately on the astonishing painting we know as “Hospital Henry Ford,” now on display in the collection of the Dolores Olmedo Gallery in Mexico City.
She was still weak from the miscarriage of July when Frida Kahlo boarded the Pullman that morning in Michigan Central Station. She thought she might not arrive in time to see her mother one last time. Kahlo and Lucienne Bloch had no idea that the Rio Grande had already destroyed the bridges at Del Rio and Eagle Pass nor that a massive surge was on its way to the two Laredos. Through an unlikely combination of unique events, on September 3, 1932 one of the most important artists of the 20th century and billions of cubic yards of muddy water were hurtling toward the same narrow pass.
The anxious artist looked out without registering the hot Midwest countryside flying by the train window. Looking inward, she was feeling the familiar pain in her back and the new one in her spirit. Her thoughts were thousands of miles down the track with her mother in Mexico. She obsessed about speed, repeating to herself, “¡Prisa! ¡Prisa! ¡Prisa!” to the rhythm of the steel wheels rolling over tracks’ joints. If Kahlo could not be a mother, she was still a passionately devoted daughter.
With equal speed but no intention other than submitting to the law of gravity, the unconscious floodwaters roared southeast down the riverbed and overflowed its banks. The water pushed downhill in its unstoppable path to repose in a calm Gulf of Mexico from whence the water had come in storm clouds the week before.
Frida Kahlo’s traveling companion, the artist Lucienne Bloch, was also associated with the mural project in Detroit. Bloch had been part of the international art world since she was a teen in Switzerland. Her father, Ernst Bloch, was an internationally famous composer. Once she immigrated to the U.S., Lucienne worked as a sculptor and as a designer with Frank Lloyd Wright. She had learned the basics of fresco painting from Diego Rivera. Her husband, the Bulgarian immigrant, Stephen Dimitroff, had been a radical labor organizer in the Michigan auto industry before becoming Rivera’s chief plasterer.
Lucienne Bloch was an accomplished photographer as well. Art history will always have a place for her: the photos Bloch made of Diego Rivera’s “Man at the Crossroads” murals at the Rockefeller Center are the only surviving record of the work after its destruction in 1933.
Bloch outlived Kahlo by 45 years. She and Dimitroff painted almost 50 frescoes in public buildings across the United States. Her photographs appeared in Life Magazine, and she illustrated children’s books. Bloch died in 1999 on the California farm where she had an art studio. She was 90 years old.
During the unplanned day-long stopover in Laredo caused by the flood, Bloch took a photograph of Frida Kahlo on Hidalgo Street that is now a famous image of the artist. But there would be no photo of Frida in Laredo if Bloch had not been traveling with Kahlo. There would be no photo if Lucienne Bloch had not brought along her Leica, or run out of film, or ruined the exposed roll removing it from the camera, or any one of an infinity of other potential mishaps.
And if María Calderón de Kahlo had not been on her deathbed, Frida would have stayed in Detroit with Diego Rivera. She’d have been bored with America, Americans, American culture, and bland American food, while Rivera ignored her to finish the frescoes. Had Frida remained in Michigan that fall, there might have been Detroit photos but not the one in Laredo.
Had there been no rain, there would have been no flood. Absent the flood, the railway bridge would have been intact, and the footbridge would not have been impassible under heaps of sticks and garbage. Frida and her companion would have arrived during the afternoon of September 5 on the 2 o’clock Missouri Pacific train from San Antonio, walked down the platform of the old International-Great Northern Depot, and boarded the Ferrocarriles Nacionales sleeper that would cross to Nuevo Laredo at 2:10. Like every other railway passenger making the connection en route to Mexico, the two women would have spent all of ten minutes in Laredo.
Not one of these events was a single cause, but each was a necessary precondition. All were in place, and the photo was made.
The floodwaters did wash away the south end of the railway bridge to Mexico on September 3, so that on September 5th there was no train to Mexico City waiting to be boarded at the station in Laredo.
With no connecting train, the women hailed a taxi and left the station with their luggage. The driver took them the 17 blocks downtown so they could see for themselves that there was no question of crossing the International Bridge.
At the bottom of Convent Avenue, Kahlo and Bloch could see that the taxi driver had been right. The high-water flotsam line had been swept to the curbs, and Laredo Street Department crews were out clearing the bridge, but it was still blocked with mud and ten-foot piles of driftwood. They gagged at the smell of the rotting carcasses of cattle being dragged off the bridge to be burned at the quemadora.
In Spanish for Kahlo and in English for Bloch, the cabbie told the story of the dramatic scene out on the bridge at the river’s crest Saturday night. He entertained them there on the street with a master class in storytelling Laredo-style, mixing humor with pathos, mockery with sentimentality, and mime with gestures pointing to the exact places where events unfolded.
The taxi driver told the two women how, as the floodwater rose that afternoon, railway crews were working to pry loose the accumulated brush that was threatening push it off its pilings. The steel bridge’s crisscross girders were like a weir that was catching everything floating down the river. Everyone could see that the bridge was shaking with the strain of resisting the water. At 3:30 pm, the southernmost span shuddered and gave way with a crack. The steel structure sank into the swirling water, and ten of the men fell with it. They and all the debris were swept down toward the pedestrian and auto bridge.
Some heads and flailing arms were seen for a few seconds bobbing in the torrent, and then they disappeared. One of the railway crew, Dionisio Espinosa, managed to float to the Nuevo Laredo side and pulled himself on to dry land. E. E. Sharkey, a Laredo resident and a conductor on the Ferrocarriles’ Pullman trains to Monterrey, was not so lucky. His and the bodies of the other five railway workers were never found.
But three of the men in the water were pushed against a flotsam island caught in the railings at the center of the other bridge two hundred yards downriver. They grasped what they could and managed to pull themselves out of the water and on to the life raft of thatched driftwood aground (or more accurately, abridged) on the bridge midstream.
The good news was that they were alive. The bad news was that the three of them were sharing the accidental lifeboat with lizards, rats, armadillos, rattlesnakes, and a bobcat. Two bloated carcasses of cattle drowned upriver were stuck underneath and supported the floating zoo as if they were pontoons.
The castaways armed themselves with wood clubs grabbed out of the lifesaving pile and established a human sanctuary on one end of the little island. More snakes slithered on board the logjam and were fought back. A goat floated by and pawed at one edge without being able to climb on. It was swept away as an upright outhouse floated by.
One of the marooned men waved his shirt at the onlookers on either side of the river. It was unnecessary: the crowd of flood watchers had seen the railway bridge collapse under them and watched the men thrown in the river. They could see the three stranded men clearly, but there was nothing anyone could do to rescue them. No one could row a boat across a hundred yards of rapids out to them in the center of the flooded river.
Half-assed ideas were suggested. In a gesture more entertaining than serious, one clown brought a bow and arrow and tried to shoot a line to the waving men out on the makeshift raft. With equal frivolity, another fired a toy salute cannon loaded with a bolt and another line out over the water. The arrow didn’t travel far enough, and the cannon’s small load of gunpowder burned through the rope. A humorist of a more literary bent tried a makeshift harpoon right out of Melville. Strike three! Men laughed. Someone muttered, “menso,” and even more colorful expressions were heard.
Devout parishioners knelt on the street at water’s edge praying. Mothers raced to the edge of the flood, babes in their arms, panic-stricken and wailing, “My husband was working on the railroad bridge! Can you see him?” “¡Poncho! ¡Poncho-o-o!” Binoculars were passed around for the frantic wives to see if their husbands had survived. Two of them were surprised to realize that they were both looking for the same husband.
Still, no one recognized any of the three survivors clinging to the makeshift raft. Women fainted. One began a widow’s keening. They were helped to the sidewalk and fanned with Panama hats. Someone ran up to the pharmacy and bought back smelling salts. Revived, the poor women were given rides home. A few hours later, all but one of them would weep with joy to see their husbands return exhausted but alive.
The Salvation Army set up a mobile relief station at the water’s edge on Convent and was serving soup to refugees from the Barrio Azteca and El Rincón del Diablo. Even though they could do nothing, the Laredo Police and Fire Department were also there on the street in the crowd of spectators. Their scouts confirmed that Laredo was cut off both up- and downriver, with the bridges over Zacate and Chacón Creeks as well as the Mines Road underwater.
With all the excitement, the afternoon quickly passed. The roustabout pilot Dick Hair flew a biplane down to Laredo with newspaperman Jack Specht from the San Antonio Light in the copilot’s seat. The little plane arrived just before dusk and made several passes over the flooded downtowns. The journalist unbuckled a primitive seat belt, leaned out with his large camera, and from a precarious perch made pictures documenting the disaster. These are the aerial photos of the flood we see in archives and scans of old newspapers.
An Army pilot landed a plane from Randolph Field on the little runway just north of Fort Macintosh. A soldier with three inflated tire inner tubes jumped in. They took off in the last minutes before dark and flew back over the flooded bridge. As they flew in low overhead the soldier dropped the inner tubes to the shivering men below. It was a futile gesture. None of men dared use one as a life ring and jump in the raging river. It may have been Labor Day weekend, but it was no time for river-tubing.
Then it was dark. The manager at the Hamilton Hotel, the tallest building in town, turned on its rooftop spotlight and aimed it down at the flooded bridge. In the circle of light, people could see that the men were still hanging on for dear life. One of the castaways waved a signal of gritty determination. They could also see that the island was getting smaller as it lost sticks and boards to the water swirling by. The attrition of the floodwater’s wear and tear would eventually break up the logjam, and if the water rose any higher the entire island would float free. After eight hours of exposure on the raft, the men were getting weaker. Something needed to be done.
After midnight, Chief of Police Carmelo Mendiola and Fire Chief George Renken huddled with a small group of officials and businessmen to conjecture about how long the temporary logjam would hold. After the laughable fails of the afternoon, it was time to come up with a serious plan to rescue the marooned men, whoever they were. They decided to have a team of volunteers scramble out onto the roof of the partially submerged US Customs building, and from there across through the water to the bridge. The hope was to keep from being swept away by tying themselves together with ropes. At 1 am, into the weary crowd staring helplessly out at the middle of the river, five Laredo firemen, led by Manuel de la Cruz, a 35-year-old World War I veteran, began the rescue attempt. De la Cruz, Belisario Guerra, Guadalupe Hernandez, Higenio Mendoza, and Fortunato Mireles walked calmly toward the water’s edge.
None of them knew how to swim. If anyone slipped and lost his rope hold, he’d be just another number in the official flood casualty report. They were carrying 50-foot lengths of hemp rope in six coils. The firemen tied five of the lines together and fastened one end to an orange tree just across from Customs. With four short lengths, they lashed themselves together at the waist and tossed another line over the dead lines of the electric streetcar cable overhead.
They waded up to their armpits in the flooding river and carefully made their way like tightrope walkers in a circus act, balancing on the partially submerged railings, clutching the line looped over the wires above. One fireman would slip and fall into the current. The other four braced themselves and hauled the fallen fireman back on the railing with the ropes. It took hours for the firemen to inch their way in the dark out to the stranded men on the spotlighted island midstream.
Out in the roar of the floodwaters, they didn’t hear the cheer that went up from the crowds on both sides of the river when they reached the island. One by one, de la Cruz dragged the three water-soaked men past the bobcat and the snakes and off the pile. He tied everyone together so no one would be washed away and lost. The scramble back over the slippery railing to dry land clutching the three limp men took even longer than the voyage out.
It was almost 8 that morning when de la Cruz, Mendoza, Hernandez, Guerra, and Mireles handed over the three exhausted men to the nurses waiting for them with towels. No wonder they had been unrecognizable to the Laredoans with binoculars: all three of them were from Nuevo Laredo. Vicente González Flores and Julián Lozano were Mexican Aduana officials and José Rodríguez Trigo a municipal health inspector.
The three of them had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Going out on the south span of the railroad bridge just before it collapsed was foolhardy and could have killed them, as it did all but one of the railroad workers on it. Instead, they ended up on the sticks in the middle of the bridge, and that turned out for them to be the right place at the right time. The Mexican officials were out on the river for 16 hours.
Yancey Wright, a San Antonio Light stringer, tried to interview the just-rescued survivors for his story, but Assistant Chief of Police Dave Gallagher pushed Wright aside and González, Rodríguez, and Lozano into the back of a squad car for the quick trip to Mercy Hospital. Fire Chief George Renken motioned for one of the rookie firemen to fetch five cups of hot coffee from the Salvation Army’s mobile kitchen for the rescuers. All the Chief said was “Good job, muchachos,” and went home to get some sleep at his house in the Heights.
De la Cruz, Mendoza, Hernandez, Guerra, and Mireles coiled the ropes and put them away to dry. They walked home in wet clothes. In clean uniforms and after some quick mariachis, the bomberos reported for duty Sunday morning at Fire Station #1 on San Bernardo. Firemen don’t get Labor Day weekend off. Not even when they are heroes.
On Monday, everyone was at carne asadas and picnics talking about the flood, the men in the river, and the bravery of the five firemen. The stories grew more impressive with every retelling, embellished with exaggerations and traditional Laredo narrative set-pieces. That Labor Day people who’d been on the other side of town and even children who’d been at home tucked in bed were telling first-person eyewitness accounts of Saturday night and Sunday morning.
The scheduled holiday events of a grand prix auto race down the new Pan-American Highway to Monterrey was canceled. So was the bullfight featuring “Chaves” and Cayetano Palomino. The prizefight between Ace Clark and George Godfrey at the Nuevo Laredo Plaza de Toros was postponed. The special holiday train with sports fans and thirsty boozers never left dry San Antonio, much to the financial distress of the proprietors of Nuevo Laredo watering holes. It was a Labor Day to be remembered, but not for its holiday fiestas.
When they arrived in Laredo half a day late, having waited hours on the track while the engineer made certain that the bridge over the high waters of the Nueces below Cotulla was safe for the train to cross, Kahlo and Bloch knew nothing of the dramatic rescue scene on the Rio Grande 72 hours before. After the taxi driver finished his story, there was nothing to do that hot September day but wait for the bridge to reopen.
The women checked their suitcases at one of the hotels and set out to kill time with a walking tour of the streets of Laredo. Just after they crossed San Agustin Avenue headed east on Hidalgo, perhaps on their way to freshen up at the Plaza Hotel, Lucienne Bloch stopped and let Frida Kahlo walk a few steps ahead. When her friend stopped and turned to look back toward the old City Hall, Bloch snapped a full-length low-angle photo of Kahlo in profile.
Her face looks past the photographer, squinting into the glare of the Laredo sunshine. Frida’s forehead with its trademark black eyebrows is wrinkled in a frown. Is it just the sunlight or is it a weary expression? Is she about to faint in the heat dressed in all those layers of clothes? Or is it the look of a woman in whose back aches and crippled right leg is tired of walking? Perhaps she is faint with anemia.
Lucienne Bloch en route from Detroit to Mexico City with Frida Kahlo.
Behind Kahlo, a Laredo man with a large Porfirio Diaz bigote is looking down at something near Kahlo’s feet. Is it something on the sidewalk he sees? Is it her long, unfashionable skirt? Or is it something about her shoes? Has he noticed that the strange young woman who was definitely not from Laredo walks with a pronounced limp and has a platform sole on one of her shoes?
The photo is arresting, and not just because it’s on the Hidalgo Street sidewalk all of us have walked down hundreds of times growing up.
Look at it.
It shows a young woman in distress. A father of a daughter will recognize this look. You’d like to put a paternal arm around her and take her to a safer place.
But she is not your daughter. She’s Frida Kahlo, Guillermo’s daughter.
And even though you are looking at the portrait from a distance of almost ninety years, and Kahlo is just two months removed from a miscarriage that almost killed her, you have to step back and just get out of the way. Frida Kahlo was an artist who painted her suffering right there in the foreground of her art, without asking for sympathy, approval, or permission. As in this photo, we are accustomed to see her defiantly alone and mostly in pain.
In every self-portrait and in the Lucienne Bloch photo taken in Laredo, she was always the same Frida, completely herself. For some people, dressing up in costumes is a disguise, a camouflage to hide behind. With Kahlo, dressing up in men’s clothes or in embroidered tehuana blouses and wrapped in a rebozo was only a framing device to focus attention on the work of art, which was herself.
“Hospital Henry Ford,” with its explicit connection to the Mexican folk art tradition of the ex voto, was already partially painted before Kahlo left Detroit. The painting turns the gratitude of the folk genre on its head. Retablos are created in thanksgiving for an answered prayer or a miraculous healing. Kahlo’s lámina painting, however, is a memorial to a physical disaster. When finished, the image of the stricken mother in a bloody hospital bed against an industrial wasteland landscape background is only apparently naïvely painted. She floats there in a perspectiveless space, connected by umbilical cords to disjecta membra body parts, a flower, a snail, and a machine, with a stillborn fetus suspended in some angelic space above her. “Hospital Henry Ford” is both shocking and heartbreaking.
In the Bloch photo, we see the young almost-mother, standing there in Laredo on Hidalgo Street, looking like a war casualty waiting for evacuation from the front. She is tired and absent-minded. She worries that she will not get to say good-bye to her mother and irked by the gawking man she’s ignoring in the afternoon heat. On the back of the original print, Lucienne Block wrote: “At Laredo when the Rio Grande flooded Fall 1932 and we had to wait in torrid Texas for 12 hours for a train in Mexico.”
Having read Hayden Herrera’s biography of Frida Kahlo, we know how things worked out. Kahlo and Bloch scrambled over the bridge as soon as it was cleared on September 7 and caught the train to Mexico City. In the Nuevo Laredo train station, Frida bought cajeta from a strolling vendor. The sweet leche quemada was her first taste of the Mexico she’d been so homesick for. Swept away in a flood of memory back to her Mexican childhood by an old favorite flavor, Frida smiled for the first time in months. It was going to be okay. Kahlo and Bloch arrived at the Estación Buenavista in Mexico City at 10pm on the 8th. Frida was holding her mother in her arms when doña Matilde, her beloved Mamacita linda, died three days later.
The threads of multiple life stories wove themselves together in a short-lived fabric during the 1932 flood. Then the threads unraveled, and people went off to their separate destinies. Manuel de la Cruz found his career in the Laredo Fire Department a dead-end street despite his heroics that night of the flood. He moved to Detroit and got a job with the Wabash Railroad, ten years after Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera had left. When he died in 1961, his widow, Jesusa de la Cruz, applied to the Veterans’ Administration for funds to put a headstone on his grave in the Laredo Catholic Cemetery.
The flourishing cottage industry of Frida Kahlo Studies is well acquainted with Bloch’s photo of Kahlo in Laredo. A Google image search for “Frida Kahlo Laredo” returns pages of online reproductions on Pinterest, blogs, and magazine articles.
A famous artist was in Laredo for a day in 1932, and we have the photo to prove it. But the Bloch photo only exists because of the accident of weather and a flood. Nothing to take pride in. On the other hand, we are proud to remember that coincidentally with Frida Kahlo’s day in Laredo, five Laredo firemen — Manuel de la Cruz, Belisario Guerra, Guadalupe Hernandez, Higenio Mendoza, and Fortunato Mireles — risked their lives to save three neighbors. These Laredo names should never be forgotten.
Their heroism 88 years ago was no accident, nor was it accidental that the five firemen risked their lives to save three brothers from Nuevo Laredo.
From the catastrophic mess our two separated and increasingly walled-off Laredos are struggling to survive in 2020, we look back to Labor Day Weekend 1932 with bitter nostalgia. People of a certain age remember a lost time when the two sister cities enjoyed an easy-going, shared community with an effectively open border. We remember with pain that earlier golden age of family affection shared by Laredo and our tamaulipana sibling ‘across.’
That estrangement hurts like a death in the family.
Note: several writers have incorrectly referred to the Bloch photo as “Frida Kahlo at the train station in Laredo.” It’s not a grave mistake.
I am certain that the photo was taken on the north sidewalk of the 900 block of Hidalgo Street because of the partially obscured names of two businesses. Kahlo’s head blocks the first four letters and last three letters of Texa -s Border G- as Co. The ending of Fidel Gon- zalez is cropped at the photo’s right margin. The addresses of the businesses were Texas Border Gas, 903 Hidalgo, and Fidel Gonzalez, 913 Hidalgo.
Sources
Jonathan Burnett, Flash Floods in Texas (College Station, Texas, 2008)
Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York, 1983)
Lucienne Bloch, photos in Margaret Hooks, Frida Kahlo: Portraits of an Icon (Madrid, 2002)
Elena Poniatowska, Frida Kahlo: The Camera Seduced (San Francisco, 1992)
Laredo City Directory, 1930
Austin American Statesman, September 5, 1932
Laredo Times, September 4, 5, 6, and 7, 1932
San Antonio Light, September 4 and 5, 1932
This was a wonderfully descriptive story of the times and feelings of camaraderie between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo—and of the story of Frieda Khalo and her visit to Laredo. Thank you for your beautiful words and reminisces of the events of the past.
Thanks, Ree. I enjoyed trying to figure out how to tell the double story. Glad you enjoyed it.