Music Appreciation

I'm not a musician at all, nor any kind of a singer, and my children have all had to suffer with my singing to them as babies. But I love all kinds of music, and I love to sing, especially hymns and folksy type music. I often have music playing during the day, but there is another kind of music, a more important type, that I love to listen to: the music of my house. Sometimes I hear it when I am folding laundry or reading a book or cooking. I hear it when I am alone, as alone as anyone can be with a house full of 7 children. It's a song of life and love, of growth and change, of longing and dreaming and learning. It's someone practicing piano and singing along while others are watching a lesson on Latin, and the baby is babbling happily in her baby language. It's the 15 year-old practicing guitar in the basement while the four year-old is jumping off the couch in the family room to see how loud a thump he can make, and the 17 and 12 year-olds are in their room laughing hysterically. It's little kids laughing and being silly while the teenagers are arguing about politics and someone is stomping upstairs to their room because they were naughty. Sometimes it's loud, when a teenager is cranking the guitar solo or when Daddy walks in the door and is greeted with shouts of joy, or quiet, when they are all filling their empty stomachs at the lunch table, or during a time of family prayer. The nine year-old artist comes to me with his latest drawing of a superhero while I hear the girls singing a duet and the back door is slamming shut as children race outside to play and baby feet are running through the house. I even hear it in the hum of the the washing machine and dryer and dishwasher, reminding me of all the dishes and clothes that the children go through in a day, a mere token of all that has happened today.  I hear music all day and into the evening; in the night the music is very faint: the sound of my children safely sleeping in their beds, when I hear a cough, a sigh, a rustling of bed covers. This music has been playing in my house for 17 years, changing and expanding and becoming more complex as time goes on. With a one year-old as my youngest, I know that there are many more years of this music, but my heart still aches at the thought that someday the music will fade and no longer fill my house.While writing this essay, the music interrupted me several times to talk about sighting in a shotgun, to ask for a snack, for tears to be wiped away and to tell me they now know the difference between an 'M' and a 'W'. I want this to never end.  I have been blessed beyond measure, beyond my comprehension, beyond what I deserve.