Is this a beach where clams live, or is it a stand of trees? Everything in life shifts and changes, but the past never really leaves us.
What traces of your younger self stand out most clearly in your life today?
3 thoughts on “Waterlogged”
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My love of music (I sang myself to sleep as a baby, got my first guitar at age 14, I still play in a band today) and my 37 year relationship with my wife (my best friend, mother of my children and music partner. Amazingly, she’s still only 39 years old!).
My love for gardening started with my mom and grandfather at my grandparents’ house. I think back to how much fun it was as well as everything I learned. He also took me to my first farmers’ market; I am a member of a CSA today.
Sadly, the traumas I’ve undergone stand out most clearly.
On a more positive note, my love for music has been present my whole life. We made kazoos in preschool, and I wanted to practice it until I was a famous musician. In first grade, I strung rubber bands around folded cardboard with a small pencil fragment keeping the cardboard from touching, forming a kind of harp. I played on it at recess.
Flute was the instrument I really wanted to play, and I got the opportunity to play the transverse flute when I was 12. The “concert” flute and the piccolo were my primary instruments for the next 10 years, though I dabbled in clarinet, trombone, fife, harmonica, piano, recorder, and voice. The years of practicing instruments that are too big for my tiny instrument with way too much tension in my body left a permanent mark in form of carpal tunnel syndrome (on both sides) and scars for surgery.
Primarily due to the injuries, I can no longer play most of those instruments, but I do play the soprano recorder. While I played it in elementary school (learning nothing) and for one semester in college, I didn’t seriously devoted myself to it until last summer. I hope I can continue to play it for the rest of my life. I don’t have a group or lessons or anything, but maybe those will come in time. If not, I can still practice my instrument for myself in my own room.