Five-Minute Friday...SONG

There's nothing like a song to conjure up a happy memory.  Mothers dig out old songs to sing to babies, and lovers have "our song."  And how about a school song to resurrect the past.

Unlike the eye, which is always looking for something new and exciting and different, the ear likes to hear the same thing over and over and over.  It is always on the alert for a soothing oldie.  Song is comfort food for the spirit.                                          
                                                            

As a mom, one of my favorite memories of raising kids is Sunday-night singing.  We used to have singing friends and every Sunday night we would get together at someone's  house to sing.  We sang old songs and we learned new songs, which are now some of the old favorites we love.  I miss Sunday night singing.

Is there anyone who never got a song stuck in their head?  I can never figure out why, but sometimes a song takes up residence in my head and sticks around for DAYS.  I'm always a little afraid to think too much about that, lest I might summon a recent one back to haunt me.  Even as I write this I'm trying to avoid eye-contact, so to speak, in an effort to keep them at bay.  So, moving along...

Singing runs the gamut.  On the one hand, anybody can do it.  Anybody.  As long as you don't delve into its mysteries too deeply.  Once you start to analyze song, it's really quite complicated.  There's the pitch and the tone and the tempo, the key signature, the style.  All sorts of things, really.  But then that is another beauty of song:  Truly something for everyone.

Five-Minute Friday...COMFORT

Comfort kinda gets a bad rap.  In our modern society, we want to think comfort is for wimps and sissies.  Who needs comfort when we can have adventure?  Why tie yourself up (or down) with comfortable old friends and family when you could be out making new friends?  Comfort is almost viewed as something primitive, something we are too sophisticated to need or want.  But.... When you peel off the facade, it's what we want. 

Comfort is our default.  We start looking for it the instant we make our way to the world.  First it's from our mother.  So far so good.  But after awhile she hands us off to some else, or sets us down, and that's the beginning of enlarging our comfort zone.  Pretty soon it's full of other people and lots of places, but still our own little corner of the world, and we start to like it.

But nooooooo, that's not good enough.  Before long, we get badgered into stretching our comfort zone just a l-i-t-t-l-e bit more.  It's scary out there!  It's lonely out there!  But if we take one step at a time, we can expand our comfort zone gradually, and we can even like it.

Some of us go a long way.  We leave our family, we leave our friends, we leave town, we even leave the country.  And it's all exciting and adventurous.  But I've been around awhile, and I have observed that at some point in our lives, if we live long enough, almost all of us start looking for comfort again.  Sometimes we get a warning that our time is about up, and whaddya know, that's when we want to go back to our memories of when things were good, and we were . . . yes . . . comfortable.

Hmmm.... maybe comfort is more than it's cracked up to be...

Five-Minute Friday...REMEMBER

"Remember that time when......?"  And then you can just fill in the blank.   Sometimes it draws gales of laughter, sometimes it elicits tears.  But always it is a reminder of....back when.  Back before we were us.

Remembery, as my kidlets used to call it, is what hold us together.  It joins us with ourselves.  It connects us with our families, our friends, our churches, even with our country.  It is our common-ness.  It is what makes us who and what we are.

True, we have only the moment.  It's a really odd thing if you stop to consider that while we are always in the present, the present lasts only an instant.  And the future might never be, so that leaves the past as the main event.  We are where and who we are because of where we were.

Old friends are gold, and our siblings are part and parcel with ourselves, because after all is done, what we are is what we remember.

Five-Minute Friday...REST

When my kidlets were growing up, one of our favorite books was Rest, Rabbit, Rest.  I just loved how Rabbit had his schedule all planned out to the minute.  I wanted mine to be like that.  Alas, it didn't work out for me.

If you are like Rabbit, a red-blooded American with a work ethic and a Type-A personality, Rest is....well, uh, a four-letter word.  People like Rabbit make people like me feel like SLUGS.

I think my problem, apart from being a laid-back, Type-B personality, is that I am far too easily distracted.  My thoughts wander, first down this Rabbit trail, and then that one, till the next thing I know I don't even know what I set out to do.

Like now, for instance.  I started out writing about Rest, but now I'm on to my meandering mind.

To get back on the topic, I find that Rest is highly underrated.  (Is that an oxymoron?)  Rest is underappreciated in this busy world that we live in.  There are so many more important things to do.

There is soooo much that needs to be done.  The relentless necessities of survival, ie the laundry, cooking, gardening, shopping.  Then there is the job in order to facilitate the aforementioned.  And of course we like to have a little fun.

But sometimes only Rest will do.  Some days, like yesterday, I got up feeling lousy and went from the bed to the couch where I spent most of the day sleeping.  And today I am only slightly more energetic.  Today I am Resting to recover from Resting all day yesterday. 

All the Rest of the chores...they can wait.

Five-Minute Friday....HOME

Home is it.

Today home is a cozy winter day.  Rain drizzling outside, a fire crackling in the fireplace, a roast in the crockpot, coffee in my cup, and the murmur of the tv from the living room where the Man is happily playing on his laptop.

Home isn't always this way.  Some days it's texts from the girls.  This one's kid is throwing up, that one's dog is sick.  It could be a text from one of the boys.  Maybe a report that the girl standing next to him in airborne school is named Bertha...a throwback to a very different time indeed.

Sometimes home is a breezy spring morning sitting outside on the swing talking on the phone to my most highly favored cousin or my baby sister.  Laundry is blowing on the clothesline, later to be made into a bed smelling of fresh air and sunshine.

Home is here.  Home is now.  It's a memory.  It's a dream.  Home is everything.  It's as good as it ever gets.

Five-Minute Friday...WHAT MAMA DID

Mama is the last of our parents.  She is the only living grandparent my children have left.  She is all that stands between us being the "old folks" of the family.

Mama was, like many women, a brave woman.  But her bravery was in a class of its own,  being called on to follow Daddy and haul us all off to the wilds of South America, including a stint in the Amazon rainforest, before the Amazon rainforest was cool.  Before it was ever heard much of at all, actually.

For a kid, that is Adventure in Spades.  For a mom, not so much.  She, reluctantly, took on the homeschooling of three children, before homeschooling was cool.  She had to learn how to cook foods she had never seen or heard of.  She had to wash the family laundry in the river.  Not unlike the Pioneer women of American history, she had to hold the fort while Daddy traipsed off deeper into the jungle in search of gold and other precious things, for weeks and months at a time, with no communication whatever, and only a hope that he would come back.

Later we moved to town where she counted herself oh-so-fortunate to find a missionary hospital to have her baby in, a hospital run and staffed by a Seventh Day Adventist missionary doctor and his nurse/wife, who became lifelong family friends.

I can only now appreciate the courage it took for her to go, three ~ and then four ~ children in tow, off to where there were headhunters lurking behind every tree.

Even now, when asked about it, she will often reply with "Don't remind me."