This is a picture that I think my Nephew took in the courtyard of the old family home when we went to make offerings for the deceased on Chinese New Year’s Eve.

I didn’t notice this picture so much before, but for some reason am really captivated by it now.

I think that’s because it’s a family picture for me, not a still-life, taken in the courtyard of the extended family’s old “traditional” home, where my late Father-in-Law grew up as a child, where my Wife and her siblings grew up until a couple years after the Cultural Revolution, where all the extended family still reunites for funeral and memorial rites for the ancestors.

Somehow for me, all that gets compacted into a picture my Nephew took on this day of a motorcycle one of the cousins arrived on (the one I think looks like the Chinese John Mellenkamp), in front of some flowers tended by one of the great aunts.