Recently my sisters and I were discussing the momentum of our oldest brother's going to college and coming back home to our small town with new things, concepts, ideas. In the late 50"s on his first trip home as a freshman, he brought back a record album called "With Love From a Chorus," by the Robert Shaw Chorale. It's cover had a lady in a suggestive pose - which shocked my mother who later remedied the potential moral damage by pasting a country landscape over it! But the record was pure golden entertainment - lovely old romantic songs from the Civil War and much earlier times like - "Juanita," "Seeing Nellie Home," "Wait for the Wagon," "Aura Lee." Another cut, "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" goes way back to Ben Jonson in 1616! My husband pulled up the album on Spotify tonight and played it through an amplified speaker during dinner. Wow. In an instant I was back home in the kitchen and Mother was mashing the potatoes and putting the finishing touches on a roast pork dinner. And there was singing. And noise. And laughter. And family. Such a nuanced wave of memories washed over me to my fingertips.
I heard somewhere recently, music wounds us. Certainly it peels us wide open to wonder, delight, sorrow, awe. As I listened, sixty wide years of memories funneled down to a point at the center of my being.
And my tears were of gratitude.
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