A Lifelong Lullaby

We all have one

Summertime and the livin’ is easy. It really is. My grandma sings lullabies each Saturday. Her voice is the sweetest thing I know. I am six and a half years old and I hate the taste of honey. Melodies sway my cousin, Alexis, and I to sleep…warm and curled up beside one another. Things are always this way.

Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high. I close my eyes and see fish jumping and cotton high. The fish are orange…no, maybe pink. Actually, they’re both…like a sunset. Yesterday, they were rainbow with a waxy finish, painted with crayons and excited hands. Tomorrow, I think I’ll make them purple. This is my favorite arts and crafts project--all mine, malleable, endless.

Oh, your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’. Is my daddy rich? I know my mom is good looking. Will I be rich and good looking someday? Perhaps I’ll paint my nails red like my mom and love honey as much as my dad. Not yet, though. There is so much I don’t know.

So hush, little baby, don’t you cry. And I don’t. Nothing soothes me as much as this--the song I’ve heard every Saturday of my life.

Summertime is Saturday sleepovers with my cousins, a play-doh-scented home, and the embrace of my grandparents. It is whatever my cousins, grandparents, and I could come up with: walks in costumes, fashion shows in my mom’s high heels, cookie decorating, and hide-and-go-seek in the dark.

When I sing this song to myself, I am not nineteen, but six and a half. My anxieties are independent of my relationships, future, or responsibilities… but instead concentrated on convincing my dad to let us get a dog.

I am reminded that our youthful peace exists even in the most challenging, confusing world. The key is remembering where we hid it.