Theme Week #2

It was an amazing sunny day and the room blazed with light from the big windows in the apartment my mom and I shared.  We were sitting on the floor in the living room, just my mom and I.  Mom had just gotten a pair of speakers for her stereo and was putting  her name on the back of them in magic marker.  She was so excited about those speakers for some reason.  Later that night we had a little dance party, me and my mom.  I put on my favorite little dress, the yellow one with the bright sunflowers and the little shrug that went with it - it was the one that I had bought for my first grade school pictures that year.  We danced around to "My Sharona", spinning and twirling, the new speakers filling the room with music.

Next thing you know, Mom got a new stereo.  It was so cool and shiny, with lots of buttons and two tape players!  We set it up between the two big brown speakers Mom had from before.  It sat in our new living room after the big move from Oklahoma to Maine.  It was nice to see something the same when everything seemed so different.  We didn't have a dance party that night, the baby was sleeping, but Mom and Larry and I listened to "I Love Rock and Roll" and "Eye of the Tiger" until my bedtime at 8 o'clock.

That stereo moved to the new house too.  A big old farmhouse in a little town.  I would use it in the "other" room (I don't know why we had a formal living room, it didn't make any sense) to play the tape for my cheering routines.  The music had shifted from AbbA to Madonna, and "Into the Groove" echoed through the house until it was time for my brothers and new baby sister to go to bed.  Then I would sit on the floor, leaning against the speakers so I could listen with my headphones until it was dark.

After the house burned very few things survived, unless they were in the "other" room.  Miraculously, the stereo didn't get seriously water damaged and it went to the new apartment that Mom moved into.  I would take the baby over on nights that my brothers and sister were at their dad's house.  Mom and I would listen to TLC's "Waterfalls" through the CD player plugged into the old stereo while having a glass of wine and cooing over Mom's first grandson as he fell asleep to the music.

The old stereo didn't survive Mom's move to Tenessee.  When we went down to visit her and Tom, they had a spiffy new pile of electrical components to stream music through the living room and out onto the deck by the pool.  This time, Mom and I were sitting outside in the jacuzzi listening to the music spilling from my teenage sons room as he talked on the phone with his girlfriend.  The name of the song must have been somewhere buried under the heavy bass beats and rapper chorus.  As darkness fell, and the swell of the cicadias' song drowned out anything but the thoughts inside my head, I rose and headed inside to tell the kids to turn off the music and head to bed.