in the bleak midwinter

After the Lower School's holiday concert, I had plans to run errands with Gabriel and knock a few items from my to-do list, which has been buzzing around my head with more intensity than I'd like of late. But then the concert was very long, and Gabriel was very grouchy and hard to maneuver through the school parking lot, and in the end we scrapped it all, stopping at the library (which is not even on my buzzing list!), and eventually coming home to paint.

The concert was, as I expected, very beautiful. The first, second, third, and fourth graders sat in groups on the floor of a gym, forming a wide circle, the center of which became a stage. They played music, danced, read stories they had written, recited poetry, and sang. The grande finale featured the Upper School Chamber Choir singing one of my very favorite Christmas hymns, In the Bleak Midwinter, along with the younger children. (You can listen to a particularly beautiful version here).  Surprisingly, it was not watching the children's faces singing this song--one so beautiful and melancholy, evoking a sense of being humble, stripped bare, with words (by Christina Rossetti) that you would not think to place in the mouths of babes--but the faces of their music teachers, who kneeled before the seated children on the floor, gently conducting and mouthing the words for them with wide, sparkling eyes, that brought tears to my eyes.

All children need adults who kneel before them and look at them with such single-minded focus in their lives. I am very grateful that my daughter has them, and somehow an awareness of our great fortune in that regard brought on a bout of nearly painful awareness of my own (and my children's) fragility. (What can I give him, poor as I am?) Despite the sunshine outside, I carried a bleak midwinter within--earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone--which is why I couldn't bear to drag a grumpy three year old through any more parking lots today. And why instead I retreated home with a much relieved boy for a gentler morning at home, warming ourselves by the fire.