Small Town Parades (by Attebetty)

Age is really relative.

It's about 1981. A gorgeous Saturday in June. As was usual back then; I was spending the weekend at Kathy's place.

Kathy and I had a date to meet friends at noon and go riding (I think....) We got up early, fed the horses and decided to go to Duvall for breakfast.

My new son-in-law Russel loved my hot, blue '73 Chevy short box, step-side, truck with deep dish mag rims and headers. I, in turn, loved his little bright yellow Triumph Spitfire sports car. We often, traded cars for the weekend.

Kathy and I had the Spitfire and the perfect weekend for it. We took the top off and headed to town.

At that time, Duvall had only one block of secondary street on the west side of the street.

We turned west off the main road and parked between the Restaurant and a Nursery. We had a leisurely, breakfast and then cruised the nursery.

We spent enough time in the Nursery to forget which car we came in. I got a real deal on a 6 foot tall flowering cherry tree, in bloom and Kathy got an azalea.

As we headed back to the car; we noticed there were a lot more cars parked on our back street. Then, we heard bands and engines tuning up.

Kathy remembered it was the day for the Duvall Days Parade. It starts at the south end of town, goes down the main street and turns onto the bridge that goes west out of town.

We had a good laugh when we spotted our car. We considered leaving the tree at the nursery but I found space for the root ball behind and between, the seats. We settled the tree in. It looked quite pretty sticking about 3 feet above the seat with pretty pink blossoms hanging over our heads. Kathy had the azalea on her lap. We started up to the street to find the parade was going down the main drag and we were stuck on the side street! We were going to miss our company if we had to wait for the entire parade to go by!

As Kathy said about 7 years later, "Sheesh! The older we get, the Goofier we get".

I took a second to teach her how to wave like the Queen. (No hand flapping. Just a rigid, rotating, 'high sign'...). Told her to smile no matter what, found a gap and shot onto the street between a float and a band!

We were that little yellow 'float' decorated with hanging, pink blossoms, with two 'dignitaries' smiling and waving side-to-side to the crowd and one of them holding an azalea on her lap..

We were in the parade for about 4 blocks. As the parade turned onto the bridge, we went straight and sped out of town towards Kathy's.

We laughed all the way home and made it in time to go riding.