Growing Up

Reading: "The Women Who Raised Me: A Memoir" by Victoria Rowell

Listening: "Your Joy" by Chrisette Michelle

Waiting: To Go on Rounds (Oh the joys of R.A. duty :-( ...)

"What comes first before conscious memory, before recorded images, and before the oral accounts ... is a melody. It's the sound of a lullaby sung by a woman who loves me infinitely, in a full voice that is untrained but on-key, perhaps with a frill here and there that she would never dare use at choir practice in church, but allows herself just for me. The melody is accompanied in my primal senses by the sensation of motion, as I am held to her bosom and rocked."
-Excerpt "The Women Who Raised Me"

For some reason over the summer in those moments when my mind simply wandered I could hear my mother's voice singing to me as if once again I were a child. She was singing a song, "Good morning, good morning. Good morning to you. Good morning, good morning. Oh how I love you." Seldom do I have memories which take me back that far, but this memory definitely came before I was five years old. Every morning when my mother woke my sister and I up she would sing that song. When I told her that I remembered her singing that song to us, she couldn't believe it. She couldn't believe that that memory had survived my growing up.

I remember that melody.