“Ta-daaaaaah, ta-dah ta-daaaaaaah, ta-dah, ta-dah, dah-dum-daaaaah.”

I close my eyes to the world around me so I can hear the song a little more clearly. With nothing to see, my ears pick up the patterns and sounds that I might otherwise miss.

The bassoon sings its low sad song. He’s telling the world what life is like right now. “There’s no one else around,” he says. “I’m here, singing my song, waiting for the day that I can be reunited with my orchestra.”

“I have so much to sing,” he says, with his low trills and small scales. He plays such a somber tone—slowly rising and falling again. It’s almost like a lullaby. Repetitive and calm. Slow and beautiful in its solitude.

As he plays his song, there’s the beauty of a twinkling piano intertwined. It’s as if the piano reminds him of brighter days to come. She lets him wrestle with his sorrow, and just as it sounds as though he’s wondering if he really can go on, she lets him take a break and inserts her playful melody. The one that sounds like birds chirping in the morning air. She reminds him that spring is up ahead. “This sad time doesn’t last forever,” she sings.

He responds a little brighter this time, “I hear you, but sometimes that’s hard to believe. Especially when you’re living in a time like this.”

She continues her short proclamations. This time taking a sadder tone. She acknowledges his pain with a minor key. She agrees to sit with him for a while. She lets him mourn. She lets him grieve. She holds his hand as his sadness turns to rage and then back to sadness once again.

As he plays his final note, over and over again, first short and staccato, then longer, and another even longer, it almost sounds like a foghorn. Morse code. Perhaps it’s his SOS?

She answers his every call with a note of her own. “I am here,” she says. “I am here.”

This reflection was written in response to Song for the Lonely, composed by William Grant Still and played by Lecolion Washington.

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“Do you like those boots?” My friend asks, as we start to walk towards the woods.

“I do,” I say, kicking my right foot up a little, dropping the heel in the snow so I can look adoringly at the tip of my toe.

“I bought them before we moved here. They were the only snow boots I could find in Georgia. Ironically, I’ve never found another pair here that I like quite as much. These are just so—” I pause, searching for the right word in my head—“Beautiful,” I sigh, “And warm too. Look at all that fur inside!”

She kicks up her boot and says “These are great boots, but they don’t really keep my feet warm. They are more for rain than snow.”

“You’ve lived in New England your entire life, and yet you don’t have a good pair of snow boots?”

“I’ve just never really found the time to go look, you know?”

“Oh, I know. Finding good snow boots is not the easiest thing to do. I kind of lucked out when I found this pair on the clearance aisle at Nordstrom Rack in Atlanta more than five years ago. Who knew I’d never see a pair like them ever again?”

We start to walk through the woods and I notice that there’s more snow on the ground than I thought there would be. Three of our four kids head back towards the house to get a sled, the other one runs up ahead to throw rocks onto a frozen pond.

In the rare quiet moment we’ve found ourselves in, my friend turns to me and says, “So what were you working on today?”

It used to be that I’d invite people over to sit around and drink tea while our kids played outside. It’s these everyday moments of friendship that I miss most in these pandemic times.

Now, we meet up for a hike as often as we can, bundled and masked, soaking up the few moments of conversation we can get. Our time together may not last for hours like it used to, but on these cold and dreary days of late winter, I’m so grateful for every single moment that we get.