Summer Taste

To everything there is a season, and for some reason, despite having despised country music all my childhood and bemoaned the lack of a top 40 station when I'd go to camp for 5 weeks in the Texas Hill Country, the roots were set to create a sense of place through it in me.  It gestated 45 years before it emerged.

Today I was introducing my father-in-law who loves country music to  Will Clark Green, my cousin.  Within the first strains, I discovered a hidden homesickness.

Maybe it was the magic and beauty of music that can hit you at the right moment, but I could feel Texas.  I hadn't expected to but though the songs had nothing to do with it, they evoked the sticky heat at the beach house when you've got grill duty for the hamburgers and as much as they smell great, all you want to do is go inside or to the front because it's so darn hot.   I could imagine sipping/chugging a real coca-cola and watching the sun slugglishly turn the sky fuschia and orange as it dropped into the horizon.  I could hear the medly of cars and trucks occassionally interrupting the soft roar of the ocean and chirps of various bugs with their buzzing by on the two lane road. 

I flooded with feelings, I wanted my cousins, Aunts, Uncles, all of them. I wanted the beach, my brothers, sister, Mom and Dad, the sand, the mosquitoes, the beach house, all those things and people, some tangible, some out of reach in this life, some gone, all of it. I wanted that mass like moment of my life that had been in ordinary time when we'd all come together at the now lost place to eat, to play, to swim, to sing. 

 My father-in-law liked the music and I mentally made a note to order him a CD, maybe see if Will would sign it for him, but I sat there savoring all those memories of years of summers collapsed into the chords and tonal quality of my cousin's voice.   It made me happy and homesick at the same time. 

I'll still not fully converted, but I suddenly got it.  For the first time, I'd tasted the nature of this music, the long slow development that created emotional touch points; it was like eating true barbecue that someone had sweated over for hours. 

Thanks Cousin.