that I have begun myriad posts exactly like this one and you will never know them. There was one about snow. One about our lack of snow. One about the snow ending though it never began and how much I miss les neiges d’antan.
The heavy rain. I had a dream that it was thick, wet snowflakes. I still believe that the dream was real. I could almost catch them on my tongue, right while I was lying in bed.
In an hour, I will pull the loaves from the oven, let them cool enough to run a giant knife through one. I will slab butter (unsalted only please!) on the slice and look ahead into my life.
The rain is falling in sheets, back-lit by the pine boughs, the neighbor’s fence out my window. The light is beautiful, the green needles, the red, brown, and black mottled bark. Transport me Lord.
I went outside to photograph what I thought was a white crocus. It was half an eggshell dragged from the compost by some critter. What do you think? a squirrel? a crow?
[NEXT DAY. NOW COMPLETING POST. DIG IT, BABY, DIG IT]
I attended the Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp Convention for a few sunlit and glorious hours on Saturday morning. It does transport me. I’m already feeling pretty silly about my whining.
Every March in Northampton, Massachusetts is the Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp Convention (this link is always available over in the right column of my blog, under “Music”).
You are warmly invited to the 2013 Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp Singing Convention. We look forward to welcoming singers from near and far, reuniting with old friends, and making new ones.
March 9th and 10th 9:30 am – 3:30 pm (Daylight Savings Time begins on Sunday)
Dinner on the grounds at noon Saturday evening social nearby
I missed last year’s Convention. I don’t usually make it for the whole weekend anyway, but this year I will be present for a couple of hours on Saturday morning. Come see me at the Welcome Table. I’ll draw a design on your name sticker if you want (and if I have time in all the hustle and bustle)!
After that, I’ll come home and probably schlep my kids around. Then, I will go to an Alexander Technique refresher course at my school. Saturday night, I will be seeing some funny at The Arts Block in Greenfield. Hubby has written some sketch comedy (though he and I are not in the performances that night) and the fabulous Ha-Ha’s will be performing as well.
You can go to youtube and look for videos of our Convention and yes, I could simply share one of those with you now. Instead, here I am again, singing my heart out. Because I love you.
I have posted this song before. It was deeply hidden in the post and so long ago, maybe you missed it. I don’t mean to make it a habit—reposting songs that I’ve put up before. It’s not like we’re gonna run out of good music. It’s just that some of the best music stays the best again and again, you dig?
I am working on all sorts of things, mostly just in my head while I sit around in pajamas; still, it takes my time. Things like the words pajamas and madras which come to us by way of India. Poems. Rejections. Kids. Lunches. Schlepping. Taxes. Being a travel agent. Shopping for food and accoutrements for my new phone. Make that simply learning to operate my new phone….
I’m trying to shake some bad shit I’ve been seeing on the internet—instruments of torture, abusive mothers, rape, idiocy, humanity.
This is a song to which I often turn for comfort in difficult times. I like to lead it at these times and it was one of the first songs I was able to lead.
I filmed this a couple of months ago, before my current bout with anemia, still in summery weather, still looking and feeling good.
Sometimes when I sing [what to me are] the most intense and deeply meaningful Sacred Harp songs, I smile a lot. This is not because I am necessarily feeling happy about an event or situation; rather because I feel free from the constraints of being human, because I love to sing with a free voice, and because I love to sing along with my compatriots.
Grab your book (if you are a reader here and don’t have The Sacred Harp yet, you really need to get one for your first New Year’s resolution) and sing along. Page 448 bottom. Let’s have at it.
Back from California which feels good. To run on one’s own neighborhood’s sidewalk, to hike in one’s familiar woods, to cook one’s own food, to eat one’s own mother’s famous spaghetti sauce, to sleep in one’s own bed, to see one’s own children in the flesh.
It is my father’s birthday today. He would have been a whopping 91 years old. Yeesh. What does that make me? Still a girl who lost her father too young is what.
I liked La Jolla, somewhat, especially the ocean and the pretty architecture and being able to ride bikes around and the beautiful plants, flowers, and trees and the birds one doesn’t find in the Eastern US and the art outside the museum and the food, some of the food anyway. I loved our B and B and Margaret, the innkeeper and chef. I liked some of the food in San Diego. I did not like Coronado, but I did like the pretty beach. It was so windy, the sand whipped at our feet and the stainless steel public toilet made our ass skin very cold.
Who says ass skin? Nobody, nobody but me. Try it, though. It is not as easy as it seems. It is practically a tongue twister. And I’ll stop right there lest you get ideas and think of any double-entendres.
Long ago, I thought I would chronicle my travels, no matter how humble and close-to-home, by taking photos of myself in the facilities (the “loo” in other words) of places I visited. Probably due to my restless nature, I did not stick with the plan, though on occasion, I do remember to take a picture (if I’m lucky enough to have remembered my camera).
I do not have a photo of the stainless steel toilets from the public restrooms at either La Jolla or Coronado, but when I searched google images, I found a lot of photos of fancy, $1200 stainless steel toilets, presumably for the asses of Romney-type voters (Koch, Bush, Rove, but let’s watch those double-entendres, plz).
We had the pleasure of yet more friends coming to visit us from further north in California, this time a couple who we already know. You may recall we met Ms. Coldiron for the first time earlier in the week.
We went to a little park just a block from the sea and we sat on a bench and we sang songs to a guitar and a banjo. It had been a long, long time. Seven years maybe, gasp.
When we were singing in the little park, freezing our buns off, a little wedding was going on. Sometimes I sang a little bit loud, what one might describe as enthusiastically, I think, and when we all realized a wedding going on (because we weren’t quite sure at first), we tried to be a little quieter. The amazing thing is that the wedding people never asked us to stop. It was all so groovy, but it didn’t really feel hippy groovy or California groovy like you’d think, but it was groovy nonetheless.
The song I most remember grooving to was this one. We sounded pretty good, but I think Susan and George’s fingers must have been about frozen. Amen.
Here is a photo of the handle in the bathroom on the Star of India at the Maritime Museum in San Diego
Of course it is not me peeing, but it is what I was looking at as I sat. The ship originally did not have modern toilets as it was an old ship, but even these “modern” pieces of hardware are more beautiful and solid than most of what one finds nowadays.
One thinks of other things one can describe as solid brass.
The other day in the car, I was listening to one of our local indie radio stations (yes, I know it’s quaint to listen to the radio) and this song came on and hit me over the head like a ton of bricks. How could it not? It’s crazy and bold and unusual and annoying and entrancing and her voice, well, it’s powerful and clear and schmaltzy and beautiful and perfect for musical theater and it draws me right in. I had to look it up on the playlist when I got home because its title wasn’t announced by the time I got out of the car. And if you think wiki qualifies as research, I did a tiny bit of that, too, just to be fair to the writers. I think it’s a brilliant song.
Yes, Hubby and Violet have finally made it back from China, both in all pieces, meaning each in one piece, at 2 this morning. It was high time.
No one seemed to read my post the other day. I swear, on my stats page, not one hit. What’s up with that? But if you do read it, it sort of makes this Music Monday more of a twofer, as they say in FM-radio parlance, but also, that means it should be posted on a Tuesday. But this isn’t FM radio, you dig? so I’m still in like Flynn.
Before I think the better of it, I am going to post a video of myself singing a French song. If you have any better ideas, you do your own music monday. I already did a driving in the car post, maybe more than one, so I’m trying to keep it fresh.
Erin O’Brien over at the Owner’s Manual is not only a published author of renown, but also used to do quite a lot of youtube videos. Did she ever sing on them? Further research would have to be conducted by yours truly before I could answer that; but she makes me a little braver than I might otherwise have been had she not boldly paved the way for a blogging chick like me.
The word is reign, from regner; not rain, from pleurer:
Easter is not a holiday I feel much of an attachment to. However, I was reminded this week of a specific time in my life, a new friend I once had, her life and death.
8 years ago, I began singing Sacred Harp every Tuesday night at the Helen Hills Hills Chapel on the Smith College campus in Northampton, Massachusetts.
I got to know Mirjana Lausovic at the Tuesday night sing a few years later after she moved back to the area from Minnesota with her husband and 2 young children.
Minja, as she was known, was one of the strongest women I have ever met—happy, practical, full of joy and life, big in presence and physicality; loved her kids, huge heart. Everything about her was open and present—she was buxom, full-lipped, had big eyes and a big smile, and of course, a powerful voice. Formidable was the word that came to mind the first time I saw her. She was easily approachable and had a humility I draw from to this day.
Minja had beautiful silver hair and it was cut short. I, too, kept my hair short and we joked together about haircuts, how it didn’t really matter who cut it or how: no muss, no fuss. I never knew why her hair was short and gray; she was, after all, a couple of years younger then me.
When I began to sing in the Sacred Harp group, in 2004, I had a difficult time socially. If it hadn’t been for my fierce love of the sound, my determination to add a creative endeavor for myself after years at home raising my daughters; if it hadn’t been for my training as a teacher of the Alexander Technique, I would have bagged out. I found the group strange and clique-y; I didn’t understand the social dynamics. I heard a lot of talk of “welcoming the newcomer,” but my presence seemed less than welcome. I was baffled and spent many a Tuesday night filled with the joy and satisfaction of learning a new, powerful way of singing, but with an undercurrent of my own sadness and anger at feeling on the periphery of a group [supposedly] dedicated to a communal tradition of song.
Minja was a remedy for all of that, a breath of holy spirit.
She died less than 2 years after I met her. It was a shock to me because I didn’t know her history—she had had breast cancer and pulled through several years earlier and this was apparently a recurrence. They left town one day in July of 2007 and she died 2 weeks later, on my birthday, something I recognize as a great gift.
I remember the evening before Tim and Minja and the kids were leaving town. I had prepared a little card and a bundle of ribboned lavender from my garden. When I handed the card to her, my instinct was to walk away so she could open it at her leisure, no pressure to say she liked it in case she didn’t, nor to respond to the words therein. But she said, emphatically, “Can I open it now? I want to open it NOW.” It was so much her, living for the moment, taking a bite out of whatever life presented.
♦ ♦ ♦
Today, I watched as my daughter’s Agricultural Arts teacher introduced 5 new colonies of bees to the existing hives on the school’s campus. Nicki told us that the worker bees, all of whom are female, do not lay their own eggs, in deference to the queen’s laying.
I saw the first tulips open in my side garden bed.
I am preparing a dish for dinner with eggs from my neighbor’s chickens, a salad with greens from a local farm.
Sometimes I receive emails from a fellow parent at my daughter’s school and they close with the statement “Walk in the light, wherever you may be.” Some days I begin to know what this means.
Today is Passover; tomorrow is Easter. I know I have been delivered, here and now, to the center of a swirl of abundance that I call home, the earth.
Yesterday I took my youngest to a dr’s appt in Springfield (1/2 hour-ish drive) and we listened to Sound of Music in the car. This was a staple of my kids’ childhood and it had been a long time since I’d listened to it. It was a staple of my own childhood, too, come to think of it. We sang along and sang along and sang along while we admired Julie Andrews’ multiple-octave range.
Speaking of multiple-octave ranges, we then listened to Mahalia Jackson. How sweet the sound!
I took a new way home so as to avoid a 3-mile traffic jam which we saw on 91 N as we were heading south. But I did a silly thing and ended up seeing more of Chicopee, Massachusetts than I ever thought possible. I took 116 North and it went on and on and on forever. I suppose I’ll never drive that route again unless I have to.
One cool thing was crossing the Connecticut River in a spot where the bridges and water and trees were an interesting jumble off in the distance. I couldn’t look for long because I was driving. The day was bright and sunshiny and my kid is pretty amenable when you take her anywhere alone in the car (with older sister is an entirely different story).
That’s a good day in my book.
A couple of Sundays ago, I took the girls to some antique/thrift shops up on Rtes 5 and 10 in S. Deerfield. That was fun. Violet got a good bargain on a bunch of oldish, broken watches. She thinks she can take them apart to use for projects/jewelry making. She also found a 1950s-circa silk dress that is fabulous and only 15 bucks. This is not a price one finds much any more on vintage clothing. It’s in tip top condition and a perfect fit.
Annie was happy with a couple of old glass bottles.
My greatest buy was 3 hats for 5 bucks each. Vintage hats nowadays run upwards of 15 dollars each (if you’re lucky), so I don’t buy them any more. This was a bargain and I’ll be going back to the same place some day to see if they restock. So fun! Hooray!
This one is the oldest and in the best condition, the veil is still intact and it has covered metal stays on either side inside.
A goofy thing is that each hat is a shade of purple; I didn’t try to find purple hats, it just worked out that way.
Here’s a goofy one with “flowers.” It looks sort of pirate-y:
You’ll have to suffer in not getting to see the other hat. I’m too dang tired to take another photo and I’ve just inherited a situation in which I have to frost some chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganache that was taking too long to cool and set for Annie to do herself before bedtime (there’s a going-away party for a dear classmate tomorrow).
My keyboard is practically covered in chocolate ganache fingerprints, but I did finish the cupcakes and can now go to bed. 3 sticks of butter in that ganache recipe. Ridiculous, Martha Stewart, absolutely ridiculous! I should kick your ass.
I couldn’t resist one more photo after all
strange-looking cupcake in lower right corner actually has flaked chocolate on top, designated for the going-away kid
twinklysparkles 