Dear The Lone Bellows,

I hope that you'll forgive the blunt nature of this post but honestly as one Southerner to another?

Go home and listen.

Go home to any little church in Georgia, Alabama, in the Mississippi Delta, or the mountains of the Carolinas, Kentucky, or Virginia.

Sit down, shut up, and listen.

There, if you are lucky, you'll hear the distant call.

The music that you're trying to connect with.

Then when you've found the well spring?

Take a deep, long drink from that well and forget every thing that you've heard.

It's a simple song that you 'll hear.

The emotion let loose to fly.

Even the technically correct fall short of it.

When you sit there and that moment happens. When you are all but sure that there's nothing left of you but breath and heart beat?  When a deep exhale, as it it's your last, is all you have left to say.

When you look into the eyes of someone you love desperate that it might be the last time.

Those are the lyrics and that is the melody of the old Southern Sound.

No axes to grind. Just breath to breathe.

"Get up." when your' feeling you can't.

I'm telling you this because I have hope that another voice can be added to the chorus. One to express the new, old sadness of loss. The shards of life that turn to laughter and the song of survival.


Good luck.

Kind regards,

c anne ford, mother, Southerner, writer.

December, 9, 2013

PS It's been a difficult couple of days. Lots of vomiting and diarrhea.  I hear this too will pass.

I'm just not what it's supposed to pass into.

.