It’s that time of year: Music and Memory

It’s mid-August, almost two months after the summer solstice. The days are getting shorter, and the mornings have a distinct hint of nippiness in them. Not enough to actually warrant wearing more clothing, especially when the Spanish sun rises and the days heat up to nearly 100 degrees. But the early mornings, right before the sunrise, do have a freshness about them that I haven’t felt since April.

I have mixed feelings about the changing seasons. Change has always been hard for me. I’m a Taurus. I like things fixed, and solid, and dependable. But I also move around a lot, having lived in 3 countries and 4 states in the past 20 years. So it’s a mixed bag. I love knowing that autumn is coming. Even though the autumn we get here in Spain is a bit of a joke compared to autumns in Pennsylvania, there’s still the changing light and shadows, the longer nights, and the smell of pine in the forests to celebrate.

So the point is, it’s mid August, and the days are getting nippy. Which means that I find it appropriate to play my Christmas playlist on Spotify. It’s made up of Christmas piano and choral music, and I’ve been listening to it for nine years. I stop after Epiphany on January 6, and for eight long months it sits there in my Spotify library, unused, but not unloved. As soon as the first mornings feel chilly, I break it out, and it’s like putting on a lovely well-worn much-loved sweater. It’s familiar, cozy, and nostalgic.

I remember when I first made it – sitting in a flat in London in December 2011. My Pandora Christmas station wouldn’t play there because Pandora is only available in the US (and I wasn’t hip to VPN’s yet then). So I made a playlist on Spotify with similar music from my Pandora list. It was rainy (it’s always rainy in London in December) and I was looking at my sweet little Christmas tree I bought outside the Shepherd’s Bush tube station that day. I remember it as a dark period in my life because I was finishing up yet another year with no baby. I had been pregnant during 2011, but it ended in a miscarriage, the same way my pregnancy in 2010 had ended. We weren’t sure we were ever going to be able to have kids naturally, and the depression hovered over me like the winter mist.

The next year I broke it out around October 2012, and I still wasn’t pregnant despite doing fertility treatments and subjecting my body to shots and probing. But I would become pregnant the next month, and as 2012 drew to a close I was holding a secret that there was a tiny bean in my tummy which, if all went well, would grow into a baby who would make its appearance in August.

It’s been with me each year since then – in London, in California, and in Spain. And each year when I first put it on in August or September, all the nostalgia comes rushing back over me, warm and rose-colored.

And so yesterday, when I asked Alexa to play it in the kitchen as I was making breakfast, I had to stop for a moment and just sit with the memories for a minute. Recognize them, and say hello to them for a moment before going back to regular life.

Music is more than just the notes – it’s the meaning and the memories infused in the score, and nothing is filled with more memories than holiday music that gets brought out each year.

And so, while I’m not looking forward to a freezing home, or shorter days, I am looking forward to the sweaters, and the cozy memories wrapped up in the music that I’ll be playing over the next several months.