All's well

I couldn't quite explain it to myself, even as I scrolled through lists of streaming music last week - but I had a powerful, if vague, sense of the sorts of sounds I wanted to hear. And when I found Ledward Kaapana's enchanting Kiho 'Alu, a brief album of tunes played on a Hawaiian slack key guitar, I knew that I'd found jsut what I was looking for. Sure, the weather outside was still mercurial, and, sure, there was a stack of papers and quizzes waiting their turn to be graded. But with Kaapana on my little speakers, my world seemed to take a deep breath, and relax. In fact, I wouldn't have been very surprised if a tropical drink had suddenly materialized on my desk.

The tropical drink never did take shape, but the past few days were, in other ways, delightfully tropical. There we were, running through passing drills at soccer practice on an absolutely sublime Saturday morning.
There we were, wearing flip-flops and turning the garden soil; there we were, watching several of Cleo's classmates stripping their shirts off in the heat of play at the big playground, for James' fifth birthday party. And there we were, waking up on a balmy Sunday morning, windows thrown open, the day absolutely full of promise.

Music, perhaps, cannot by itself effect such weather. But it can embody the spirit, I think, of such a weekend And so now, as I play Kaapana's album in my office and finish reading the last student paper, it no longer merely promises an end to the winter; it also feels tinged with the happiness of a recent weekend well spent.