Down Memory Lane: Quilting, Hymn Sings and Nostalgia

In my experience, quilting is a sure time for the mind to wander; at least if you're quilting alone. If there is more than one of you on the job, quilting is a sure time for chatting. Or, it can be a great time to go through the old tape closet and listen to every single cassette down the long line. I have great memories of doing that with my sister on cozy afternoons by the quilt -- singing along; starting on the next song before it came on because we knew them all by heart; shputting the wanna be bass (the dutch "shputting" sounds nicer somehow than "making fun").

Today I was sitting at my quilt alone, no sister to go through the old tapes -- although, goodness knows, we have quite a few. My little school time buddy was spending the day at grandpa's because he's spoiled (and I'm spoiled and grandpa's are spoiled), so I'd been spending the day in delicious, selfish projects: finishing a book, practicing choir music and now, quilting.

Coming to the quilt straight from practicing music had me in a singing mood and I was happily belting out songs in my quiet basement, with the dehumidifier for accompaniment. I grew up in a family of singers and have loved music for as long as I can remember. As a little girl, I sat by my mom on the hard, wooden benches in our tiny country church with its cement floor and block walls and lovely acoustics. She had a beautiful voice and I joined her singing alto at a very young age, I want to say before I ever went to school.

When I was young, our church hosted their mid-week Wednesday evening service in each other's homes. Packed in our brown, VW van or crammed into the old Reliant, our family would sing. Someone would start a song and then another and another. I can think of a whole list of songs we used to sing on those Wednesday night drives -- "Some glad day my soul will fly, way up high, in the sky..." I loved the rhymes in that one. "Once I wandered alone, in blackness of night..." We never had a good, strong soprano but songs with alto lead? Those were our best. "You have heard of little Moses in the bullrush..." Some of those songs I've never heard sung anywhere else.

The first Sunday night of every month was "Hymn Sing" at Shady Lawn. On those nights, out would come the stacks of old, green songbooks stored inside the pulpit. These were doled out carefully, a few to each pew, and the evening would commence. It was a sad day when the stack of green songbooks no longer reached around and a different book had to be chosen as the old, 'Select Church Songs' were no longer in print.

I did a google search today, and there it was, in all its nostalgic beauty. Although, I don't remember the day that ours looked that nice.

The song that got me started down memory lane today, all alone at the quilt, was this - "Soon we'll come to the end of life's journey, and perhaps we'll never meet anymore......" Suddenly I was transported back, back to that little girl on the hard church pew with the voices ringing out around me. "If we never meet again, this side of heaven...." Me, with my little girl voice joining mom's rich alto and Elsie's soprano joined by Wilma's, crazy how you can be transported back in time and just hear those voices!

That old, green songbook held many favorites. Some of the best were the songs by Albert E Brumley. "I'll Fly Away", "Jesus Hold My Hand", "If We Never Meet Again", "The Sweetest Song I Know"..... I would love to page through that old book again. That pretty one pictured above is on Amazon for 70 some dollars; I think I'll settle for hunting up mom's old copy when we're home for a visit.

The trip down memory lane led to looking up Albert E Brumley songs and listening to different ones. The deeper the nostalgia went, the stronger became the urge to forget the quilting and write it all down. Looking back those days seem perfect; full of love and old songs and memories. I'm sure that is the perspective of a child and there were just as many cares and worries and responsibilities as there are today but it was a fun trip, and I'm glad I took it.

One thing I will never forget and that is this: When the moderator announced "We'll sing one more after this", for a perfect ending to a monthly hymn sing, the song needed to be "When All Of God's Singers Get Home". It made the evening complete.