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If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you.

Last updated on October 23, 2018

Click to donate toward Step Out: Walk to Stop Diabetes
Click to donate toward Step Out: Walk to Stop Diabetes

I love music, and that’s not such a strange thing to say. Many people do–music helps you get through the day, work harder, work smarter, work out harder or relax. I love a weird, wide range of music that spans everything from a song just released a week ago, to Mongolian throat singing. A lot of my music choices are simply sounds that move me to respond to them. I would like to think that my father and mother were especially responsible for my broad love of music.

My mother was music. She was constantly humming, if she wasn’t humming, she had the radio on, if she didn’t have the radio on, she had the television on a music channel, and if she didn’t have that, she’d play the guitar. Specifically, her amazing sounding twelve string Fender acoustic, which has a sound that belies simple word description here. The guitar was such a crisp, clear sounding thing in my mothers long-fingered hands. She brought it with her a lot–sometimes when I was younger and she was a bit healthier, we’d go visiting friends or neighbors and she would bring it. Sometimes they would come over to our house and she would bring it out and dad would get his.

I think that when I was very, very little, my mother would pick me up and place her in her lap in a rocker and sing to me. She would sing simple songs, like Rock-a-bye-baby, or You Are my Sunshine, didn’t really matter at that age I suppose as long as it was a comforting sound, and it was.

Today, I don’t go a single day without having some sort of music. I either have Spotify running for hours on end on my computer or we have Sirius radio running on the server hooked up to our TV/Stero. If I am not listening to music on my computer or stereo, I am humming and singing. If I am happy, I sing loud and silly. If I am sad I hum slow and mournful tunes. If I am in the car, the radio is always going and I am happy that I married a man who loves music just as much.

I am like my mother in that, I cannot go to long without some sort of music. I cannot play the guitar…well, I can’t play any instrument really. I never had the patience to learn to read sheet music and drums were fun until I was forced to realize that I couldn’t keep cheating and play it by ear anymore. But I sing. I sing Rock-a-bye-baby and You Are My Sunshine to my birds and cats all the time. Someday’s three or four times, sometimes once . I sing and I think of my mother and all of the music she gave me in my life.

I keep hoping someday I will get to hear her sing again.




Help pay for Mel's tattoo in memory of her mother
[box type=”bio”] Melissa Pence is wife to the husband and wife team here behind 2 phatgeeks. On December 11th, 2011, Melissa lost her mother to a long, difficult battle to diabetes. In her memory, Melissa is blogging 24 hours in order to raise funds for her through the organization: Step Out: End to Walk Diabetes, and for the personal goal to finish a humming bird tattoo on her right arm in memory of her mother. [/box]
Published inPersonalPhat Life