This morning it occurred to me how happy Cedar’s happy-plodding sounds make me.

On the bigtree trail, she’ll get lost in some kind of smell- or chewfest then come plodding and jingling up to and past me. On this quiet springy morning–where I imagined the forest has one thing on its to-do list: GROW!–Cedar’s bass paw-plods and treble tag-jingles made me think of Irish music, the bodhran and the tambourine, maybe. Which in turn turned me to my man, Seamus.

Here are some haunting lyrics of his that suggest he had more than verbal music in his soul.

THE GIVEN NOTE
On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.
 
Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather
 
Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy
 
For he had gone alone into the island,
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.
 
So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don’t care. He took it
Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.
 
Still he maintains, from nowhere.
It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.

And here are a couple of clips…the first an attempt to capture a few of Cedar’s given notes (not captured was fiddle-wail when neighbor dog Kamou–aka Kujo– sunk his teeth into Cedar’s flank), the second, maybe a nod to the lovely “bits of a tune / Coming in on loud weather.”

In any case, a moment of gratitude for these little notes, and I guess, “the whole thing.”