I thought about the former days, the years of long ago; I remembered my songs in the night. Psalm 77:6

IT IS NIGHT TIME. The room is dark and quiet. A car rumbles up the street while dancing flickers of light and strange dark shadows dart across the walls. A clock ticks softly in another room I can see the outline of the archway between the dining room and living room and the blackness of Mommy’s big dining table under a ghostly lace tablecloth. In the corner of the dining room on the right are the forms of my rocking chair and little red table with all my crayons and papers with my princess drawings on them. Across from me in the living room are tall windows with lacy white curtains. The lights from the street peek through the lace making soft spots of light on the walls, the ceiling, and on Daddy’s big dark chair in the far corner.

I press my head against the arm of the couch and pull the warm quilt up around my neck. I turn my head back and forth. Again tonight my knee is hurting so much. I close my eyes and try to sleep. My heart throbs in my knee. Thin and pale I hear my voice calling through the darkness.

“Mommy! Mommy! My knee hurts!”

A tall shadow moves out of the darkness toward me. Mommy sits down at my feet on the couch, where I sleep in our big house in Saskatoon. She gently pulls aside the covers. Her hands feel cool on my hot leg. Slowly she moves her strong hands up and down, gently rubbing my swollen knee. I smell lineament. I hear the lineament bottle go “blupah” as Mommy pours a little in her hand and then rubs it onto my knee. Somehow it begins to feel better. Then, beautifully and softly, she begins to sing. I close my eyes.

I am glad to be home from the hospital in Chicago, glad to be out of the narrow iron bed with iron bars over it that held my leg straight up in the air. I can still hear the hollow clanging sound of the iron weights hanging down from the bars when I would swing under the bars like a monkey. I told Mommy how lucky I was to only have one leg in traction. If it were both legs, I couldn’t swing on the bars at all. I would have to lie flat like I was dead. I remember seeing tears in Mommy’s blue eyes when I said that.

I love my Mommy. I love her hands and her voice and her eyes and her dark curly hair. She is tall and strong. I think of when she carried me in the train from Saskatoon to the Chicago hospital. We missed Daddy so much but he had to stay home for a while to work and take care of baby Dicky.
I am so tired. I hear Mommy singing softly into the night. The smell of lineament floats through the darkness. My tears dry and I fall asleep.

Still His song is with me—and forms a prayer to my God who has been with me all my years like a loving mother caring tenderly for her child, “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me. By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me—a prayer to the God of my life.” Psalm 42:7-8.