strangers almanac mia and jonah

One late spring day during my sophomore year of college, four or five months after my grandma passed away from a not-so-lengthy bout with lung cancer, I walked out of the English building and onto the quad. At the base of the concrete stairs, I saw a pile of pink dogwood blossoms shed by the nearby trees intermixed with a plentiful smattering of cigarette butts. I had been living in a hyperaware state for quite some time by then, but the juxtaposition of the ugly and the beautiful, sitting there on the ground, stunned me.