Tag: #music

Last Sunday I drove through a deluge to Bloomington, Indiana, to say goodbye to my older daughter. She’d finished her graduate program, and after the celebration that afternoon, I was going to help her pack up a uHaul van with all her worldly possessions. Her new life in a new state, hundreds of miles away, awaited. I felt happy and excited for her. New adventures, new influences, new experiences awaited her, and she was ready. I tried not to think how my days of driving over to hang out for a day, to have a swim and a bike ride with her, were over.

Driving along Indiana 46 through Nashville and Brown County, I was flooded with memories of the fall evening in 2009, when she and I made that drive together, for the very first time. It was raining buckets that night, too, raining so hard that I was unable to see more than a couple of feet in front of the car. I was unfamiliar with the hilly, twisty road. There was no place to pull off. I just kept going, creeping along at ten miles per hour during the worst of it, afraid to stop completely, afraid to go faster. My daughter, uninterested in the college tour I’d arranged, was silent next to me. She had no desire to go to INDIANA of all places. Funny how things work out.

Back then, I was struggling with my work/life balance and felt wobbly about many other things, too. One thing hasn’t changed.  I still feel wobbly. But I’ve acquired a few tools to cope. One is that I accept the wobble without judgment. Or try to. Sometimes I still resist it. After all, teetering is scary and frequently results in pain. But is pain always bad? Maybe it is essential, like rain?

I wonder if seeds feel a stabbing ache deep in their hearts, right before they burst into bloom? Do the flowers in the garden that is mine—suddenly, inexplicably mine —do those flowers cry tears as they leave their snug underground root homes, and push into the bright, overwhelming world?

I wonder if the bird songs I hear this May morning are songs in tribute to an earlier time, a warm time in a safe, blue-egged world?  Do we all sometimes yearn for what we have left behind?

Like the birds and the flowers, I am always pushing out of the past into new sunshine. After the first dark nights of spring—those ones where the nights are bitter and cold—I think after those are past, the songs and blooms open into new dimensions. The harmony of life is always rooted in the oldest times, in the home, the baseline—oh, but the melody! The melody—it is ever-changing, renewing, like the new birds hatching, like the new flowers blooming. The melody reflects the newest influences. How much sun, how much warmth, how much care and how much love we drink in, how much love we shine back.

My melody tastes smooth and green today, like the perfect ripe avocados I slice on my beans and rice. It tastes like strong espresso in the morning, tastes like a deep cleansing breath, tastes like my dark red root chakra, tastes like my heart opening up like a sun-drunk peony, yellow-pollen dusted. My melody smells like oatmeal bubbling on a gas stove, feels like being touched and feeling loved, like sinking into a steaming bath in a claw-foot tub. My melody sounds hushed, like the deepest shade of listening, shivers against me velvet-soft as a word heard in the dark, and held safe.

My harmony echoes the old beats, the cutting fear that smells of metal like blood and swelling August summer nights and darkness, sharp, salt-edged, a scream unheard. My harmony is dropped, not held, dropped like a penny in one of those spinning funnels at the fair. My harmony smells faintly of baby powder, Annie Greensprings, and the onions I chopped crying at Taco Bell, sweating in my brown polyester uniform. It smells of a hand clamped over my mouth,  and also of kittens mewing and apple juice and laughter and marshy-fresh tide-pools in Biddeford. Of Carolina pines, of Gilbey’s gin with squirt lime, it smells like a grimace, a shuddery gulp, a shiver, and a tight hug.

Somehow, new songs are written,
aren’t they?
even when you can’t see where you are driving
can’t see the where the edge of the road
falls away to cliff
driving blind
new songs come together
out of old and new notes
bright and aching and alive
forever, and always, new songs.
Driving back from Bloomington,
rain pattered my Subaru’s roof
like a drumline, a sweet soothing rhythm
this road will never be the same,
without her smile at the end of it—
I wrote new songs in my head
driving alone down Route 46
thinking about what I left behind
one last time, one last time.