i am a unique and beautiful snowflake.

the road leading to the cemetery was backed up with donkeys and cars. we had to park way far away.

going into the cemetery there was a woman in robes pouring out warm clumpy milk from a plastic bottle onto tea glasses on a silver tray and children milling without their parents. there was the blaring of party horns carried by running boys, and the sound of laughter. two girls longjumped down the sidewalk.

then as we went through the stone walls i could see plots of earth claimed by picnic blankets, and hear the rushing sound of propane burners. down the haphazard rows there were people tending the flowers on the white marble tombs. nearby a man arranged red and pink roses in a glass bowl that he placed next to a headstone. children pushed past us from behind, and through.

"i didn't want to spoil the fun," said mo.

the whole village seemed to be there. people walked back and forth along the main road with plastic trays of food, fruits, vegetables, sweets. other people sat and tended kettles and pots on burners. one or two people would sit on huge ground sheets as if to invite others to sit down with them, which we did with an old woman who crouched on her haunches while she boiled us turkish coffee, which we drank and moved along.

women had us take pistachios from their held-up aprons. girls moved in the smaller pathways between the grave sites and worked in pairs to pour fizzy pop into plastic cups. the earth was greybrown and the tombs were white. the stones and bricks that terraced out the cemetery along the hillside were bright white like they had just been given a fresh coat of paint or whitewash. the marble tombs looked like they had all been wiped clean. some of them had tulips carved and painted in with red.

"trippy," i said to mo.

it was. everywhere there were people sitting on the concrete slabs that made the base of the tombs, or leaning against trees, or sitting on blankets. a woman brought us another coffee. another woman brought us tea. a woman poured us coke, which we said no to at first, but she insisted, saying when it comes to you, you have to take it, you can't pick and choose. it seemed to be the women bringing things around. i don't know if that was actually the case: i don't know if there is some part of the tradition that says it is the women that do the giving. fresh from a night of half-hearted lusting after the firespinner and the violinist it seemed to be the women only who were doing the offering. but i did not know for sure.

sometimes instead of a tomb there would just be a pile of dry earth with a ring of white painted stones around. there would be stone at the one end, sometimes a bundle of white roses, or sometimes a wooden stick with a scarf tied round. there were rose petals on the ground, and very small cedar trees. many of the graves had wine jugs half buried.

and always the tooting of those party horns which i learned later were made from torn off pine branches, green branches such that you could pull the wood out from the bark, leaving the bark to be a tube, then you could blare through the tube.

people kept bringing me things and i knew i had baklava to share too. i'd made sure it got in with the picnic supplies. but it took me a long long time to go get it. it was only baklava from the kipa, store-bought, and that was because i feel safe shopping at the kipa where everything has its prices clearly labeled and everything is pretty much where you expect it to be. and so i almost did not dare to share. i waffled. and waffled and waffled. but i knew.

i am a unique and beautiful snowflake.

when i went to paw through the plastic bags, looking for the baklava in its barcoded plastic tray, i was informed that it had already been shared out. it had been taken out with the vegetables and the raw garlic and the nuts and sliced into pieces.

and maybe people liked it. maybe the honey even dripped out of it, baklava which never hurt anyone and never showed anyone anything but love.

then when it was time to go there was pressed down grass under where the groundcloths were, and we walked out over the rose petals and past the smoldering firepits.