Greetings!
December 3 – Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors). (Author: Ali Edwards) #reverb10
Hmmm… not alive. It’s been too long as I write here in a New Year a year gone. (01-11-12)
But a Moment.
A Moment that, in hindsight, proved memorable, as so many Moments do.
It was December, the time we are writing about, in fact, in a bizarre turn of Fate’s Wheel.
Borders was not doing well.
And it showed.
Far from being a happy Christmas season, it was being full of stress & rumors that the store would be closing.
December is not an easy month for me anyway. Beyond the normal stresses & reminders of those in the United States, I have the additional moment of my mother passing on Christmas Day, 2005.
So, it was a time within a time. Things were hard. Things felt hard. The one became the other and it seemed like there was nothing much to be done about either.
And then, in the midst of it all, I received a gift.
Well, actually, I received this gift later, but it has to do with Christmas and a moment I had in December.
One day, in the midst of all this hard, I had occasion to call my husband at work.
I was put on hold, as happened.
And I stayed on hold.
But it was okay.
Because I was given the gift of music.
As many do, I love the Peanuts Christmas special, and that was the music that was playing.
I stayed and listened for several songs, until at last the music changed and I hung up and called back.
But I felt better.
And then, later, when the world, my world, fell in once again, and the box was opened to find a cat no longer there, Mike brought me home a gift that left me with tears of joy amongst the tears of change.
He brought me home that CD.
Not just a copy of that CD, mind, but that exact physical one, the one that I’d listened to those months before.
A small thing, but huge at the same time.
It reassured me that everything would be all right, that we would make it, that our world would reform in an even better way.
And it’s still some fine music! 
Let’s hear it for the joys of music and it’s ability to bring you safely home from here to there.
Chirp, Chirp!
-Birdy :>
) point of view that really lets your fingers fly.