By Ann Winschel<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My Mom sang around the house a lot, mostly songs she heard on the radio, and I picked up the habit. She was from a small, German-Catholic farming community in southeastern Missouri where I once scored cred with one of my many cousins because I was able to correctly identify the song the band was playing as one by Hank Williams, Sr. Hank must had a Quaker sensibility to write lyrics like this<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The silence of a falling star<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Lights up a purple sky<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n One day, just about ten years ago, I was in my car, alone, trying to sing along with the radio. I couldn\u2019t. Nothing music-like would come out of my mouth. As I sat there trying to croak out that song I realized that it had been years since I had sung in my car – or in my home. That did it. Gave me the clarity and courage to see that it was time to leave, I could no longer stay in a marriage that was so stifling I had even lost the ability to sing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Talk about feather\u2019s flying, it was the divorce from hell. When things had more or less settled down I bought a new car and began to travel. I went on several solo, 4-6 weeks long road trips to the West Coast, singing along with my music all the way. I drove white-knuckled over breathless mountain passes, got rained on in Death Valley, and once I found myself in the Mojave Desert when the spring flowers were in bloom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a lot of country between here and the Pacific Ocean so sometimes I flew over all those mountains and deserts. On one trip, while I was high in the air, an old friend, whom I had lost touch with, sent me a series of rambling text messages. Most of it didn\u2019t make much sense but one part was clear. Please come.<\/em> So I did. That was the beginning of a long distance romance. The song reflects the high hopes we both had for the relationship. It didn\u2019t work out in the end, but thats a story for another song, one that is still waiting to be written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now I sing all day long, the same two lines over and over and over. Drives me, and anyone else within earshot, crazy. It is fabulous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Soaring High – the story behind the song lyrics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1102,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-march-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1107,"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions\/1107"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareletter.milwaukeequakers.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}