Imagine

Linking up today with Lisa-Jo over at Five Minute Friday. Today's word prompts is imagine.

The afternoon was cool and cloudy, not the weather I'd hoped for this May weekend we'd headed to the beach for a getaway and to celebrate my birthday. As we strolled along the promenade (which sounds much grander than it is), we stumbled across a bench with a Happy Birthday banner strung across the back, a flurry of bright colors popping through the day's grey.

My first thought was that a little girl was having a birthday at the beach and perhaps this was to mark the meeting place for her friends or maybe it was a stop on a scavenger hunt. Then we pretended it was just for me and snapped a photo.

The next day, we rode our bikes along the promenade and as we meandered along, I was reading the backs of some of the dedication plaques on the back. One of the plaques caught my attention because it was in memory of "Mustang" Sally B. As a Mustang convertible loving duo, we laughed and began to imagine who Mustang Sally was. Then I saw her life dates ... and her birthday was the day before. The day we saw the birthday bench. The birthday banner was nowhere to be seen this day, but I thought we had once again found the birthday bench.

Who was Mustang Sally? How much fun did she have at the beach? How much was she loved? So loved that someone took the time to commemorate the 98th anniversary of her birthday with a banner on a bench at a beach?

I had imagined a little girl's birthday celebration or a leftover banner someone just hung on a bench just for fun. I hadn't imagined the love of a husband, child or friend celebrating a life that wrote nearly a century of stories.

Who were you, Mustang Sally? I've been imagining your story ever since I saw your banner.

Note: Upon closer examination of the photo, it turns out that the birthday bench didn't belong to Mustang Sally after all. But it made me begin to imagine and wonder about the stories and lives of the ones whose names were on the bench plaques. So, thank you, birthday banner hangers, for providing some color on a dreary day and for sparking some imagination in this overwhelmed mind.