My mother's radio

I just heard a recording of a song from my childhood and I was washed back in time like a salmon swimming upstream.

Warm yellow lamplight pooling around a simpler place and time. A time when I believed the world was happy and safe and flooded with love. A feeling of certainty that someday I would have all these same feelings with a family of my own and life would go on forever, one song at a time.

Which is why music often makes me sad. It evokes feelings that rise up as real now as they were the day I first felt them. It is a time machine like no other, dropping me back into the world of a little girl whose parents loved each other and her so much that they sandwiched her in between their hugs while meatloaf and hot rolls were sitting a yard away. I've never known such complete and perfect love as the way I perceived it then.

My world was small. Our house was smaller, three children in a bedroom so tight that even with all the doors removed, we couldn't walk between the beds without stepping over the ladder of the bunkbed. But we had everything!

A playroom in the basement next to my dad's office. A glassed in porch where I sat on a daybed and watched for the milkman to come with his horse. A dining room where we ate cheese sandwiches with butter and mustard, and spooned up bowls of vegetable soup for lunch.

My own spot in the kitchen where I could actually heat water on a toy electric stove, or iron my father's handkerchiefs with a real miniature iron. Child safety was not what it is today, but I did okay and I learned to cross stitch by the end of that year too. It was probably my first year of truly sentient feelings. Before that I only have puddles of memories.

Here the river begins, accompanied by music from my mother's kitchen radio.