Cookies and a Clarinet

Many people may not know this, but I actually minored in clarinet when I was at Brigham Young University. Band was also a huge part of my high school experience. Who knows how many auditions, lessons, rehearsals, competitions, or performances I may have participated in over the years, and in college I usually practiced my clarinet for at least an hour a day. (So many hours spent down in “the catacombs” of the Harris Fine Arts Building!) I even have a permanent indentation inside my lower lip and one on my thumb to show for it. I loved the rush of performing, and to be honest I don’t know why I gave it up. After Kenny and I got married I was so focused on finishing school as quickly as possible, then we were starting our family, and with other priorities that once cherished wooden clarinet (that cost more than my first car) has sat unopened inside its case for more years than I care to count.

I’m not sure why exactly I was seized this morning with a desire to pull it out and then play for an hour. Perhaps because I recently came across a cassette tape of one of my clarinet recitals from college. While playing today, my hands did remember those fingerings, and the tonguing and some other techniques were still second-nature (although I am not up to any triple tonguing again, at least not yet!), but these muscles are sorely unconditioned, my breath support not anything like what it used to be, and it will take some work to really bring my tone up to snuff. But guys, I played my clarinet!! I even pulled out some clarinet solos of yore that I’m sure I hadn’t looked at for at least 20 years.

It has felt so good to be bringing more and more music back into my life, what with rejoining my handbell choir, learning some new pieces on the piano and playing more often, and I’ve even been doing some online singing lessons. Add picking up the clarinet again and I’m once again appreciating how much I love making and expressing myself through music. I’m regaining a huge part of myself that has felt a little lost, certainly since Covid and leukemia, but in many ways long before that.

Further evidence of my healing came, funny enough, from a batch of cookies this week. Out of the blue on Tuesday I suddenly wanted to make some cookies (well, maybe not so out of the blue, noticing that chocolate chips were on sale at the grocery store near our home was surely a prompting factor). And not just any cookies, but Kenny’s famous chocolate chip cookies (he made the best cookies, and guacamole, and pizza dough, and fast Sunday stew, and…). The ones that nobody else ever made as well and that for two and a half years I haven’t been able to bear even thinking of making on my own. I have used A needing to eat gluten free as an excuse to not do much baking (although she is becoming quite the accomplished GF baker herself), and there was no way I was going to change (ruin?) Kenny’s recipe by trying to make it GF.

Following a quick stop at the store for supplies, the three younger kids and I worked together after school to make a big batch, and they were every bit as good as we had remembered (sorry, A, but we did make them with wheat flour). Wanting to once again do such normal, everyday “Mommy” sorts of things feels so so good. I know it was only a batch of cookies, but to me it has represented a lot more. Another small step toward returning to myself and to the Sawyer family we once were.