glow little glow worm

While I was at Starbucks today, the music of the Mills Brothers came on, singing "Glow little glow worm, glimmer, glimmer...." And I began to cry. I remember my mom playing that song on the record player (33 1/3 speed) in the basement while she ironed clothes on Sunday afternoons. Her blue uniforms for her manager's job at Ben Franklin's, hung in order for the six days of the week that she worked. She loved that job. Sometimes I think she loved the job more than us at home and I am certain she got more consistent respect for her skills from her co-workers than she did from us. We tended to take her for granted, I think--how she juggled work with keeping a pristine, German-type orderly house, planning meals (which my younger sister often got stuck with cooking since I was often too busy with afterschool activities), doing laundry and, of course, the ironing.

I hate to iron. I used to have to iron my high school gym uniforms which added up to some % of our P.E. grade and those waistbands and collars were a pain. I have tucked away my ironing board in the closet and probably haven't taken it out for five years. When I absolutely have to "touch up" a shirt or pants, I use a folded towel and put it on the counter to act as an ironing board. My old iron that we got when we were first married still works, so out it comes, about once every three or four months.

But the song today didn't trigger resentment about ironing; it triggered the memory of how my mom made a boring task something lighter because of the music she heard in the background. She played '40s music but she also added more contemporary choices of John Denver, Simon and Garfinkel, Joanie Mitchell and even a few Beatles tunes made her cut.

This particular song also reminds me of when my sister, my cousins and I used to catch lightening bugs at my Grandparents' farm. We always let them go before the oxygen in the mason jars extinguished their light and their life, but, for a short time, I think we felt a bit godlike with our powers of capture and contain this fragile element of late summer evenings, the lightening bug.

If I could, I would look for that kind of light tonight, the weekend before the autumnal equinox. Something ancient tugs at my soul to contain light from the darkness and then release it back into the night.

All this from a song that the Mills Brothers recorded, 60 some years ago, when America's own light beamed strong.