The Avett Brothers were singing In the Garden. MFD rewound and played it a few more times. The rest of the house was silent, and we were on different floors, just listening. Not typically a lover of religious hymns, I was mesmerized.
On a cold and windy January night, it made me think of spring, of promise and wistfulness, of mouths set in grim lines, of young hands held by old hands, of darkness falling more swiftly in the mountains, of twilight, of yearning. Different things, some in opposition to each other.
It made me think of opening my grandmom's back door to the comforting constant of the radio playing low in the kitchen.
In late spring we'd sit at the dining room table and talk about how the lily of the valley were coming up that year in the garden. If they came up and spread, Grandmom thought that was the harbinger of a good year, and when I was older I knew we were talking about more than a good year in the garden. Today I have my own garden and a patch of lily of the valley that I have my own conversations about.
Music is a great inducer of memory. Like in Piano Man - He says, "Son can you play me a memory, I'm not really sure how it goes." It can transport me immediately to a moment or a slideshow of moments:when I first heard the song, or a time when I loved or hated it; to a big or small event where it was on in the background like a soundtrack to a moment, or to something I haven't thought of in years but was reminded of instantly.
Listening to that song Sunday night made me feel how circular time is, like everywhere I am in the present, a small piece of me has been there before with someone else in a different time and place. Is that weird? Maybe. But I like to think that is the case, so that everything and everyone that has gone before is always a part of me and my layers of memory.
