Musicality

Listening to music while driving is one of my favorite things to do. I’m a regular accompanist for Adele, Frank Sinatra, Pure Prairie League, Norah Jones, Journey, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Marshall Tucker, Dylan LaBlanc, Neil Young, and The Indigo Girls. To me we sound pretty good together, but what do I know?

During one of these mobile mini-concerts, I realized that the songs on my playlist were time – travel conduits, instantly zooming me back to great memories of moments in time. Conjuring up a connection to a person, group of people, or peak experience turns a mundane errand like running to the grocery store – into time well spent.

Music does all that. It never fails to lift me up.

Here are some personally notable melodies, in loose chronological order:

You Are My Sunshine, Bicycle Built for Two, Sparrow in the Treetop, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Erie Canal, and more…(My parents) – random and countless long car rides in the station wagon

Best of My Love (The Eagles) – silk-screening in junior high print shop

China Grove (The Doobie Brothers) – marching onto the field with the twirling squad for my first home football game

California Girls and Don’t Worry, Baby (The Beach Boys) – hometown summer carnivals

How Deep is Your Love? (The BeeGees) – making deliveries on my brothers’ paper route with my sister

Baker Street (Gerry Rafferty) – zipping down the parkway to the Jersey shore with high school girlfriends

Rosalita (Springsteen) – dancing on a rooftop in Morgantown, WV

Into the Night (Benny Mardones) – late night walks home from Sunnyside

Brown-eyed Girl (Van Morrison) – singing with friends in the back of a pick-up truck on a dirt road in rural Abaco, Bahamas

Already Gone (The Eagles) – Kawagama Lake camping trip with with friends, northern Ontario

You’re Just to Good to Be True (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons) – dancing with my husband on our wedding day

Here Comes the Sun (George Harrison) – winter solstice celebrations with neighbors

Just One Look (Linda Ronstadt) – kitchen clean-up dance at Lake Placid with lifetime friends.

And the following songs remind me especially of my kids:

I Am Light (India Arie) – for my daughter, Joy

Bennie and the Jets (Elton John) – for my son, Ben

Fly Me to the Moon (Frank Sinatra) – for my son, Luke

There is so much more music both before and after these snapshot memories because to me, the music never ends.

I wonder –

what are the songs you live by?

Best Colors

The best red is our new washable livingroom rug.

The best orange is my husband’s quarter zip sweater (in his favorite color) that he wears a lot.

The best yellow is our house of eighteen years.

The best blue is the memory of my Mom’s eyes.

The best green is soon-to-be leaves on awakening trees.

The best Violet is my niece by that name.

The best pink is Peppermint Stick ice cream on a sugar cone.

The best white is the hammock chair that hangs under the silver maple all summer.

The best black is a tiny box that holds my hearing aides.

The best brown is our good buddy Oliver – who is mostly brown and softly furry.

The best tan is the warm sandy beach at the Jersey shore – under my feet.

The best gray is our bedroom – painted by us last summer.

The best color mix is the unlikely rainbow on the first anniversary of losing my mom.

The best colors are everywhere because they are in the things I love.

Treehouse

If I had been a few feet taller I could have peered inside to see who lived there. With luck, maybe even lifted myself up and in, dropping onto soft mulch and humus that surely lined the yawing hole in the old silver maple. Instead – as usual – I settled for the low-hanging branch on a nearby dogwood, walking feet up the trunk at a dangle, swinging a leg over and hefting myself up and onto the mottled branches above.

There have been many other trees. There was the cherry that overhung the back side of the house. It was an easy climb; its raised scar-like ridges making temporary impressions on my bare hands and legs, and lasting ones on my memory. It was best up there when the serrated leaves were deep green and the yellow cherries were ripe to pick, even though birds and squirrels always claimed first fruits.

One summer the whole gaggle of us neighborhood kids lived in a copse of trees up on the corner. Each claiming a perch, we embellished leafy territories with makeshift thrones of remnant boards and fistfuls of nails hammered home into accepting limbs. Stretching gangly appendages up and around redolent limbs of wood, our adventures unfolded in a hidden world, suspended between earth and sky over days and weeks.

Nowadays, sentinel branches beyond the frosty windowpane offer a striated view of the wintery world two stories below. Soon red buds dotting twiggy limbs will yield to leaves, and our small corner bedroom will disappear behind living green lace, a perfectly familiar hideaway in imagined secrecy of sorts.

A treehouse never gets old.