My treasures

At the back of the storage. Underneath a box of Christmas decorations and behind the fold-out table we only use if we have more than five people over for dinner. In a tattered cardboard box that once, many years ago, carried “quality baking potatoes” from some, to me, unknown farmer in Ireland to a small greengrocers in the West End of Glasgow, Scotland.

That’s where I keep them, my treasures. My songs.

On coffee stained, weatherbeaten pages that almost fall out of their covers I read the blue and black ink. I travel in time to the days and the places I wrote them down. I feel the love, sorrow, anger, elation and excitement again. I hear the melodies and feel them play in my heart. As clearly, as if I had just put down the pen after writing them down.

I’m a firm believer of living in the present, but I can’t help to notice how much of what I do now takes power from what I have been through. Every page of my novel comes out of what I did “back then” and my songs all focus on the past.
I don’t see anything wrong in this but it sure makes me wonder when the songs about the present will come and what they will say.

“Some day we’ll look back at all this and laugh” doesn’t cover it. All things are not funny in retrospect, but they are easier to understand. I smile and place yet another fully scribbled notebook in the box.

I was digging for treasure today and found it. In the margins of the over-edited renderings of a conquest, I found gold. Very frank notes that spoke so much louder than I had ever imagined they would when I wrote them down.

At the back of the storage I hide my treasures once more, until the next time I will need them again.