THEME MUSIC

If anyone ever makes a movie about my life (and I say this in total jest – why on Earth would anyone do such a thing?), but if they did, there should always be music in the background. The first button I push in the morning is the coffee maker, the second is the radio.

I was probably 11 years old when I got my first radio and I remember how carefully the dial had to be turned to bring in the scratchy sound of the AM signal.  It’s no wonder my age group got so many of the lyrics wrong in those days, we could barely make out the melody, let alone the words.  I do remember that my very first favourite song was ‘Cherish’ by The Association.  Out of curiosity I just Googled it, I had some of the words wrong.

My introduction to music started well before 1967 though.  My older sisters had a record collection of The Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley, and Roy Orbison to name a few.  My mom loved Herb Alpert and Frank Sinatra and the big Band sound of the ‘40s.

Truth to be told we could go farther back – Hymns I would have heard throughout my childhood are still some of my favourite pieces of music.  I do know the words to those – it really helps to see them written out in hymnals and practise them on a weekly basis.

In the short span of my lifetime the delivery of music has transitioned through LP vinyl records to 8 Track tapes to cassettes to MP3s to God knows what, I lost track.  Over the airwaves (is that even a word anymore?) we’ve had AM, FM, and satellite.  The crazy array of file sharing services available leaves me overwhelmed and intimidated although my son-in-law did me set up with one because he thought he should help an old lady out.

My personal choice is SiriusXM.  I absolutely love how I can pick a genre of music, or a specific decade, or even a single artist, and their playlists will give me the songs I love in random order so that each of them feels like a happy surprise when I hear the opening notes.  From the day I bought my first car with complimentary months of SiriusXM I have been hooked.  I have since added to my contract so that I get it in the house as well.  It provides me with my life’s soundtrack.  It’s never not playing.

This is not how my significant other feels about music.  Or at least that’s how he started out, it appears I may have improved him slightly over the years. 

In the beginning his opinion was that the radio was ‘just noise’, and that an operator of a machine should always be aware of the sound of his vehicle.  Although it can’t be argued that this is a good thing it made for some pretty long boring drives, so I would turn the radio on, tune the volume down and play ‘70s and ‘80s era country music until I had him converted to a car music listener.

Last year he bought his first brand new truck complete with its own complementary SiriusXM offer, something he really enjoyed until they wanted him to pay for it.  Just like that, he was back to listening to his motor.  I have to drive his big blue Dodge occasionally so I revived the son-in-law’s gift of Spotify and introduced my phone to his truck through Bluetooth (old dogs can learn new tricks if need be) and once again there is music wherever I go.  I’ve noticed I get invited along on quite a few parts runs and I’m suspicious that it’s because the music comes with me.  I wonder: is it my company he wants?  Or my phone’s?

Either way, it was the path Fate took to gift me with a song I hadn’t heard in decades – probably not since the days of my scratchy AM radio. 

You see, the way I have my playlist set up in Spotify is sorted by artist.  I was alone in the truck so I picked someone different – John Denver, one of my favourites.  They played several selections that I knew very well and then came the hauntingly beautiful ‘Today’.  On the one hand it seemed brand new, but on the other hand somehow I knew the words: 

Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine

I’ll taste your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine

A million tomorrows shall all pass away

‘Ere I forget all the joy that is mine today.

It’s my new old favourite.  I’m working on the joy part.  They better play it in my movie.

 

HERE I GO AGAIN

It’s not like I don’t have lots to do already. 

I hope that doesn’t sound like complaining, because that’s not how it was meant.  It is true that I do have lots to do, but they are jobs of my choice – after all, I am retired and have the privilege of deciding what I’m going to do on any given day.  And deciding is what I’m doing these days.  Deciding whether I will process tomatoes into pasta sauce or make beet pickles or tackle a batch of creamed corn or dig potatoes or take the cucumbers that we can’t possibly eat all of over to the pigs and make their day. 

There is also the decision of when I’m going to turn some of those carrots into cake.  The fact that there will be carrot cake in the near future is inevitable, it’s just a decision of the timing.  What the heck I’ll do with the other 1,000 or so carrots out there remains to be seen.

I could go out and sit quietly on my deck on this September Sunday afternoon but that view presents me with a whole other job list.  This late in the summer (or is that early in the fall?) all of the flower beds are looking tired and depleted.  They need to be cleaned up, trimmed back, or yanked out, but I prefer to do that job after a frost has finished them off.  I don’t know if it’s a Global Warming thing or not, but there are still no frost predictions on the horizon.  I am totally ready for Jack Frost to force my hand into autumn clean up.

Well, I say that now, but this yard is huge and clean up is a big job.  Maybe waiting isn’t such a bad thing.

There is just so much to do.  And really, this isn’t meant to sound like complaining. 

I know what the problem is.  Or rather, who the problem is.  I am the problem.  It’s me.

You see, this yard doesn’t have to be this big.  I’m the one on the mower.  It’s me who decides that it would look nicer if a person cut the grass between the garden and the bins, and both the west and south ditches, and the swamp as soon as I can get in there without getting stuck … and sometimes a little before that.

I’m the one who, even though I made a solemn oath to myself the previous harvest season (all of them, throughout my entire life) to be more sensible in the amount of seeds to put in the ground come spring, I foolishly put all of the seeds in the ground anyway – because, you know, I have lots of seeds and lots of ground.  Unfailingly this gets me way too many carrots, beets, corn, beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers, just to name a few.

I’m also the one who didn’t feel that one smaller flower bed was enough so we built a large rock garden into the side of a hill.  Which I then encircled with a flat rock path … and then decided it needed a companion garden (also with a rock rim to it) to provide balance in the yard.  And also more room to put flowers that I keep accumulating.  There are also flowers along the front of the house, at the gate, and along the east wall of the garage.  I don’t know if the ferns behind the house count as an actual garden, but I planted them there, so maybe.

And then there are the two dozen planters I tend on my deck.  I’m not saying that I single-handedly keep the local greenhouse industry afloat, but they’d notice if I quit.

But, back to my opening statement:

Last week I found myself off to the city on an impromptu ‘girl day’.  I was just along for the ride, no shopping plans, nothing that I needed.  Of course, we went to some stores anyway and because I was left alone and unsupervised I found myself in front of the display of bulbs you plant in the fall to have tulips and crocuses and daffodils first thing in the spring.  I have tried this before but I picked the wrong place and they didn’t survive.  But I know better now.  Standing there, mesmerized with the thought of early flowers I plotted where they would go, how pretty they would be, how many I would need.

You have to understand how helpless and vulnerable a person is at a time like this.  A drug addict ain’t got nothin’ on a gardener in a next-spring-it-will-be-so-pretty frenzy.  I bought two bags of each kind.  I now have 112 bulbs to plant.

As I said: as if I didn’t have enough to do already.  But, I also said I’m retired, remember?  I and that meant I could make my own choices?

I therefore choose to expand the flowerbed along the east wall of the garage and plant my springtime vision on the next day that isn’t too hot to work outside.

See?  It sounds easy when you say it fast enough.