My children have been growing under a steady stream of musical styles. Pandora is frequently playing classical throughout the day, and in the evenings when we are cooking and cleaning up, we switch to some Ipod selections and dance our way through dishwashing and drying and trash takeout.
I feigned embarrassment when last year my 5-year-old son blurted out at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra that the song they had just begun in the pin-drop silence was Mozart. "Mama, that's Mozart!"
For the last few years I have been a fan of The Avett Brothers and have been in the right places at the right times to see them play live five times. Their shows are something to see. Talk about passion for music. They write poignant songs and play them with fervor. At their live shows, they have a person behind them dedicated to restringing their banjos as they are known to break a few dozen in each performance. You can't help but clap, dance, tap, shuffle or perhaps even twirl or whirl when you see the band enjoying themselves so. Music is a relationship. A two-way conversation. As Scott Avett says, "music is a physical exchange."
When the brothers closed a Braves game here in Atlanta a couple years ago, I knew it was a perfect environment for the kids to see who they'd been dancing to after all those spaghetti dinners.
As you can see, Evan was far more interested in the peanuts and Coke than the music, but I feel hopeful that I have successfully indoctrinated him.
Since then he has been persistent in his desire to learn the banjo even though his Daddy wonders if his Mama is pushing it on him.
I deny pushing it on him, but I'd be okay with it.
I'm linking to Cindy's Hidden Art of Homemaking Chapter 3 book study.
I'm familiar with the angst that Edith Schaeffer cautions us about when she says, "Some day I shall be fulfilled. Some day I shall have the courage to start another life which will develop my talent."
Angst was my middle name while I spent many years in the corporate world aching for "some day." Corporate America did not suit my soul, but I could not have predicted that the answer to my quest to find my calling would be found in motherhood and homemaking.
Ironically, a trick I implemented at work to soothe my restlessness became a way of being in the world that works as well now in my fulfilling life as it did back then while I was trapped in a cubicle under florescent lights like an African violet. I'd tote in flowers absconded from the courtyard and convert my coffee cup into a vase, play Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata while I was building spreadsheets, or invite a co-worker to a picnic in the sunshine instead of eating in the break room. I was just trying to bear the day, it made me feel better, and others enjoyed my efforts too.
Like Edith says in Chapter 2 of The Hidden Art of Homemaking, "If we have been created in the image of an Artist, then we should look for expressions of artistry, and be sensitive to beauty, responsive to what has been created for our appreciation." Edith sets our minds on a journey, a quest to pay attention. Now that I get to spend my days in my home teaching and learning with my
children, helping them learn how to notice beautiful things has kept me
always looking for ways to bring art and creativity into our home to
enrich us and those who pass in and out of these doors.
What I like about small efforts is that they seem to be contagious. My kids, still young, already seem to understand the difference expression makes, like when they pluck several of the few Irises from the yard for the dinner table or use my Grandmama's Pyrex bowl to mix paint for their artwork.
I'm linking to Cindy's Hidden Art book club.
I'm not sure what possessed me but I took a notion to stab the maple trees that live near my driveway with a 1.8" drill bit. Actually, Audrey Kate did the drilling and I did the taking a notion part.
We fashioned a homemade tap from the makers of the Bic pen and rigged up a milk carton to collect the sap that is now oozishly trickling at the rate of a half gallon per day.
Steve had the gall to say it looked tacky - a milk jug on a tree wrapped with copious amounts of duct tape to keep our sudden winter brisk from blowing away our hard work. I did point out that the empty container was once housing organic milk, so that should show we have some class.
After the first batch of sap was collected, we boiled it down into about a teaspoon of syrup. Enough for one square trough on a waffle. But it was homemade. Syrup. From trees. In our yard. In Georgia. I was amazed even though the kids lost interest in the whole experiment as soon as they realized how little syrup the watching and waiting and boiling and filtering returned.
By the time I had amassed a bit more than a cup of syrup with a few branchy dirt floaters in it, the kids had moved on. Tasted good as gold to me and as you can see they were beneficiaries.
And the next time they use so much syrup their pancakes and French toasts are floating, I will imagine that they are imagining this gift of sugar from nature and perhaps even the hands that prepared it.
