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Rocky Road From Classic Rock to Progessive to hip hop to today's hot new tunes! |
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Rocky Road From Classic Rock to Progessive to hip hop to today's hot new tunes! |
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A singer whose songs are quite riveting, she sent this email that is rather touching and gives a hint of the deep well that her songs drink from. I thought I'd share it.
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Hello Larry,
Lots to report:
* Songwriting Cottage
* Family Stories: Uncle Dan, Grandma
* My Next Album
Songwriting Cottage
After a long glorious summer, the Pacific Northwest is stepping into her more typical gowns of grey overcast skies and rain forest drizzle. It's a good time to start writing in earnest again. I've rented a wee cottage on the Puget Sound island of Vashon to squirrel away and see what new songs my guitar has inside it. My guitar feels like a long lost lover. I'm eager to hold her again. Give us a couple months together out there on the island and I'm sure we'll have plenty to share after this long hibernation and time spent apart.
Family Stories: Uncle Dan, Grandma
Both of my mother's parents died this past year, so our materlinial family has seen the passing of the baton. In that passing, we've been clearing out my grandparents' home of 50 years, where we've unearthed secreted family stories. We found a box full of letters to and from my uncle Dan. Dan was a navy gunner on the Mekong Delta in 67-69 during the most intensive years of the Vietnam war. He was never the same after he got back - battling homelessness, alcoholism, jail. He commit suicide at age 40. These were all known facts, but then to discover this box of letters … It's both a happy and heartbreaking treasure into the past.
I spent a week in my hometown of Eugene, Oreogn while my grandmother, Eva, was on her dying bed in the hospital. What a gift that week was - mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters; crying and laughing, reflective and contemplative, delirious and giggling from lack of sleep - a hospital room full of women brought together by impending death. Although I had never been very close to my grandmother, as she laid there non-responsive on the bed that week, I got to know her better than I ever had before. I combed her hair. I patted her forehead and washed her face. I put my damp finger into her mouth to wet her tongue and clean out when she could not. I crouched close and whispered into her ear, told her it was very hard work she was doing and that she was doing such a good job and that everything was ok and we all loved her and, each of us whispered gently to her, "All your girls are here." All your girls are here. It was a mantra. It was, for our family, for our women, the most reassuring thing that could be said.
As is happened, I was on watch alone with her when grandma passed at 3am. It is a rare honor and blessing to witness death. In this day and age. It is a stark (and much needed) reminder that our lives and the lives of everything around us are but a blink of an eye. That tragic brevity though is what makes for true and lasting beauty.
In looking for a photo of her for the obituary, we found a gorgeous one - that happened to be signed in her pen, "Love, Eva." Indeed, she had given us women the best gift of all. Each other.
I can imagine these stories will show up in songs soon.
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Topic - Rachel Harrington - LWR 07:25:26 11/21/14 (0)
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