On a very rainy day, what songs can you sing?
The air was heavy and the rain on my roof told me to stay inside. It was the day when I had planned to get a have-a- heart trap and capture the cat who has lived in and around our house for more than a year.
We thought this little cat was a he, but when she brought four kittens to breakfast last month we changed our pronoun and expectations.
If I was lucky, I would be able to capture at least one of her getting-much-bigger kittens. But the trap wasn’t unavailable and the rain was incessant.
I watched out the window and knew they would still need food, so I constructed a make do shelter with two old pieces of luaun overlapped against a place where the roof sheltered a small spot next to the corner of the house and put out a huge dish of food. Capturing mother and kits will just have to wait.
Those were the lyrics of my song.
It wasn’t the song I had hoped to sing, but it would do until the words and music matched all other operant variables so that our dear sweet little mama cat and her offspring would be altered to prevent further offspring.
The mama cat…she is so tiny, at one time seeking my affection, she now is skittish, electing to stay a yard away when I am near.
But she blinks at me, a sign that she is trusting my efforts. She may never find a comfortable inside home, but we will do the best, sing the best song we can, for her and her babies.
If I could, I sing a siren’s song to find someone to love these little creatures, to take them in and create a new song for them.
What would the words be? The music? Who would sing this song?
So much of our lives are songs we sing at least metaphorically, combinations of ideas and plans and detours set to the music of our lives as defined, if not aloud, by our experience, our values and hopes and loves and secrets.
I watched my daughter two weeks ago sing a song of her youth and strength as she rid the back of the old outhouse at camp of scrub trees and underbrush that has lain untouched for years, how she weeded two well overgrown gardens and replanted one with ground cover and transplanted hostas, all the while watching over her little ones, the camp, visiting old friends in Skaneateles and finding time to take her mother to lunch at Elderberry Pond.
Did I teach her those songs? I remember singing those songs with gusto but it is a distant memory in a minor key.
And the little boys, my grandsons, who are composing their own songs, songs about legos, and tablets and finding summer friends, riotous laughing songs when they play Pictionary or Battleship.
It’s soft, quiet songs floating in the night as they drift off in their bunks, sleep stealing both the words and the music.
I sing old songs, songs that replay stronger, healthier and happier days, songs that get me through sometimes difficult hours, days and weeks.
These songs are healings for the lost songs of last year and the years before. These are songs that define my space, my time. Some are sweet, some are not.
I sing protest songs, songs that rail against the loss of meaning in a fast-changing world, a world which sometimes elevates the sordid and the vulgar and the dissembling wrapped in the cloth of the pure, the righteous and the caring.
I sing dirges for the beauty of the culture that created my songs, that is being replaced with songs that I can’t sing.
While I sing of card catalogs, the world hums tunes about Google and Wikipedia.
The best part is that I can still sing.
