This first song on the playlist this week (you may be hearing it right now) is such a moving song! It carries on its shoulders many a memory of the dear Mary Ellis House! This was a grand old place... a treatment centre for women struggling with their addictions. I worked there, for almost 10 years until it was closed down... amalgamated with my present employer. Wonder.... I recall the walls bouncing off the melody of this song so many times! We used music as a way to reach feelings, we used music to explain our sentiments and we used music for the pure joy it brings to so many. This song was heard often. Especially if I was working the afternoon shift.
I think back to the days of shiftwork and working alone and miss it sometimes!! It was not always easy, I definitely prefer how my hours now fit with my family life... but these days were full of great stuff for me, finding my way in my career!
In the evening, the women residing there would head out to their self help meetings for a couple of hours. I would have the place to myself or maybe have only one or two home, they may have been new or ill. Anyways, it was a creaky big old house and so I would soon fill it with music... I did not feel so alone with someone to sing along with, especially if it was Natalie Merchant!! The women would return and some would sing with me, encouraging me to leave it on a little longer. Well, a particular group of young women on one night came in and asked if they could enter the office (more like a big parlour than an office). We jumped around with our fake microphones and sang this song at the top of our lungs. We sang so offtune that it was beautiful. We danced around like small girls who had never danced... we were silly, we had come face to face with our joy!
These are the kind of memories I will always have of that house, the magic of the kind of work I am so fortunate to be doing, I feel so blessed with this memory too.
Well, in that same group there was one girl who asked me to bring in my CD fro her to use that song as her "Graduation song". This was a ritual we would use to celebrate a woman's completion of her treatment, she would be welcome to select any song she wanted to share with her group. I gladly brought it in and we sang and danced again! Amidst the hustle and bustle of this day, I had not thought to take my CD out of the player and it was only a few days later that I even remembered where I had last used it. It was gone! Not a surprise, I knew better than to leave something where it could possibly be stolen. This is a reality in the field, not all changes come easily! I moved on. A couple of weeks later I got a phone call from our "graduate". She explained how she took my CD and apologized but did not know how to tell me. She let me know that she listened to it every day and missed what she had here, having not had these kinds of fun and happy times in years. I knew that those changes while a little slow, were coming for her! And I knew that she needed that CD more than I did. This is a WONDER. Each woman who graced the building was a WONDER and that is how that song came to play on my site today!
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