02 Sep. Written Post 2007
“Hell-Hum”
Styx by way of Charon
Gehenna by the burning brand
Of Lord Apollyon
And as Midas dips my feet
In flaming dark Acheron
I yawn.
-Dylan Chapp, Newark High School, DE, Class of 2008.
—
“Allegro con Spirito”
I’m sitting at my kitchen table in the early morning, very groggy and listening to this very violent piece by Tchaikovsky. It’s wet outside. There’s no sufficient sort of rain to really call it a rainy day, but it has that mood, and every breath I take makes me feel like I’m on the cusp of a revelation. It might be the fog outside, the grogginess, the dim light of early morning. It’s probably the music.
It works like rotten orange peels, decaying squirrels, and nitrogen-rich substances bought at gardening stores. But it is not so simple as the positive correlation of amount of nutrients to growth of plants in size and health. Music, like all art, creates the very chance that an organism will grow in a way with startlingly unique properties. I remember that song from kindergarten, “If all the rain drops were lemon drops,” etc. But I was really more of a potato chip kind of girl. And I remember finding myself wondering what else would make interesting precipitation. Feathers. Fingernails. Chunks of pineapple.
Around this time, we had a tree in the backyard of our fairly standard Northeast Philadelphia row home. Whenever my mother obtained a cardboard box of suitable size, my older sister and I would play “carnival” in the backyard. We would attempt to hang the box from the tree with some rope from the garage in order to produce a swing before our plans would inevitably be thwarted by my father. Or maybe we simply pretended that the box was hanging from the tree, I’m not sure. Anyway, when I still wasn’t old enough to get my memories and imaginings straight, my uncle came and hacked away the tree at my father’s wishes, so that my father might attempt to plant a garden.
The garden never really worked. My father originally planted flowers around the stump, which was incidentally pretty much the shadiest spot due to trees in both of the adjoining backyards. The sun has a tough time getting through to complete the process of pansy photosynthesis. We have some grass, though, and due to the bowl-like terrain of the backyard’s lawn, the rain tends to collect in a humongous puddle in the center of the lawn. This makes it difficult for me to get to the fence I climb over as a short cut to work. Eventually my father got the idea to plant flowers along the sides of the backyard, which is small, but rectangular. This way, they get as much sun as they’re going to get without being completely flooded.
Outside, it’s raining music.
The flowers are the first to show the effects of a dripping coat of music droplets. Their purples and pinks seem to shine brighter, but that might just be the juxtaposition against the gray of the softly stormy sky. When the music seeps slowly into their roots, replacing oxygen, a whole new process begins. The music collects in the center of my backyard. Each strand of grass stands taller and greener. That grass is feeling it, feeling the flood; it’s taking in the surrounding world for the first time in its sheltered-by-the-trees life. The flowers turn their petals to the sky, to freedom. Movement becomes the only option. The pansies and the grasses all rip their roots from the solidity of the earth and leap as far as they can leap. They hop the fences faster than I could ever hop. They race for anything, anything far away that sings to the beat of the droplets of life on their souls.
If it rained music, it would grow revolution.
- Rachel Milligan, CCP, PA, Class of 2011
