Alouette

The mind is a curious attic. You climb up there looking for one thing, and a completely different box falls open at your feet.

The other night, I was watching a video online of a woman singing “Alouette, gentille Alouette,” in soft French that rolled along like creek water over stones. Nothing dramatic, no grand performance, just a simple old song sung plainly.

And somewhere between one verse and the next, something inside me stopped cold. Not pain exactly, but not happiness either.

Something in between. A warmth with sadness, wrapped around it.

Before I even understood what was happening, a memory came back to me, so sudden and complete it felt less like remembering and more like stepping through a hidden door. My mother used to sing that song to me when I was very small.

The kind of age where the world is mostly blankets, shadows, lamp light, and the mysterious certainty that a mother’s voice can keep all bad things outside the walls. I had forgotten that memory entirely, or thought I had.

Yet there it was waiting intact somewhere deep beneath decades of noise, grief, failures, jobs, bills, funerals, heartbreaks, wars, and all the other clutter adulthood piles into a man until he can barely hear his own childhood breathing underneath it. As the woman sang, I could suddenly feel those nights again.

My room was dim except for a hallway light leaking around the doorway, the weight of blankets tucked around me, the smell of clean sheets and nighttime air drifting through a cracked window. And my mother’s voice. Soft. Gentle. Patient.

Alouette, gentille Alouette…

Though born in France, I do not speak French. Not then or now, and as a child, I had no earthly idea what the words meant. For all I knew, she could have been singing instructions for repairing farm equipment.

It did not matter, as children do not hear meaning. They hear safety, rhythm, warmth, love disguised as sound.

The odd thing is how completely the memory disappeared for so many years. Entire continents of life passed over it.

Yet all it took was a melody, just a few familiar notes, and suddenly the lost country returned whole. That may be one of the mercies hidden inside memory.

Nothing is ever entirely gone, buried, perhaps. Quiet and waiting, but never gone.

I sat there listening to that song with tears threatening to embarrass me in front of my own computer screen like some emotionally compromised old cowboy in a pharmacy commercial. And for a few moments, I was small again, safe again, listening to my mother singing somewhere in the dark while sleep slowly gathered around me like snowfall.

There are songs we enjoy, songs we remember, and songs that bring back memories.