John Coltrane…wrote music
which, in his hands,
became swirling, leaping, tumbling 
sheets of sound.
That’s what he called it.
                              from John Coltrane’s Giant Steps
                      written and illustrated by Chris Raschka
                      Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books, 2002

    My oldest grandson is studying music, learning to excel on his instruments (percussion includes a lot of different instruments), learning different aspects and genres of music, and learning to manage his time as well as whatever else we all learned as we moved toward independence.
    He and the rest of his class are all working toward their college degrees in music. Music majors can specialize in performance, composition, music theory, the music industry, music technology, music education, music history, and music therapy. 
    Last weekend his four-piece jazz combo played outdoors in Columbus. They’re not professional yet, though to my untrained ear they sure sounded like it.
    I used to think jazz was an either love it or hate it music style. That is, when I tried to listen. My musical experience taught me to be an active listener. I tried to anticipate where the melody was going and how it would get there. I looked for patterns in the rhythms. I even studied a little music theory.
    But none of that prepared me for jazz. Jazz is improvisational. Jazz sings its own melodies and builds its own rhythms.
    The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival began on April 23 and continues through May 3, 2026. It’s huge, and that’s probably an understatement. You can find out about this year’s festival here. Click the menu bar to find the musical lineup, view local crafts for sale, learn about New Orleans’s culture, and visit the Food Heritage Stage to watch some of New Orleans best chefs demonstrate how they prepare their cuisine.
    From the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation's website, I learned that the Jazz Fest began in 1970. According to their mission, the foundation “promotes, preserves, perpetuates, and encourages the music, culture, and heritage of communities in Louisiana through festivals, programs, and other cultural, educational, civic, and economic activities. 
    It’s grown in scope, importance, and funding during its first 55 years. The foundation is supported by grants, donations, and events (all listed on the link).
    The word jazz is a slang term from the 1860s and and referred to pep or energy. Unlike classical music, pop, show tunes, or contemporary, jazz depends on improvisation. A jazz standard, typically a familiar tune, is interpreted through solos, a call and response pattern, and a band’s particular style. Solos are generally made up “on the spot.” The piece becomes something new. Every time it’s played and heard. 
    A good jazz band plays well together, anticipates where the lead musician is going, and follows the direction of each soloist. 
    In the early part of the last century, New Orleans had one of the most diverse populations in the South. Jazz was born of a blend of African, French, Caribbean, Italian, German, Mexican, Native American, and English music traditions and styles. It evolved and developed spontaneously by blending the syncopated rhythms of ragtime with the soulfulness of spirituals and the blues.
    Jazz is uniquely American. It’s individual, continually changing, and always spontaneous, even when it’s rehearsed.
    The most common subgeneres of jazz include Bebop, Latin, Fusion, Cool, and Swing. Beginning in the 1930s and 40s, the combination of percussion, brass, saxophones and her incredible voice made Ella Fitzgerald’s Swing easy to listen to and hard to sit still for.  
    Fitzgerald bridged into Bebop that grew from Swing. Its complex harmonies and rhythms begged for improvisation. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Ella were Bebop masters. 
    Latin jazz came into its own in the 1950s and remains popular. Fusion jazz emerged in the 1960s alongside rock-n-roll in all its variety. Fusion jazz pushes the  boundaries of everything new. 
    It’s Cool jazz, though, that music researchers are discovering is jazz with health benefits. 
    According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, listening to music can lower anxiety and blood pressure, ease pain, and improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory. 
    Music has structure. Our brains compute the relationships between notes to make sense of the chords, rhythms, and melodies. Research from the National Library of Medicine (part of the National Institutes of Health, NIH) has shown that, among other genres, instrumental jazz is easier to interpret, especially without the layer of lyrical language, so is more soothing to listeners,.
    A study done by the New Orleans Musicians Assistance Foundation (part of The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival) says Cool jazz’s “innovative riffs, cool tones, and complex rhythms can bring natural relief for mind & body.” Listening to jazz, the article continues,  improves our focus, creativity, and even our immunity. “Listening to jazz for 30 minutes boosts immunoglobulin A (lgA), preventing [viral and bacterial] infection.”
    So for my health (and enjoyment) I’ll kick off my shoes, pour my favorite beverage, find a comfortable seat and wait for the smooth, cool sounds of a piano, saxophone, or violin to accompany the songbirds in my backyard. Join me?

I’m reading a young middle grade novel, Appleblossom the Possum by Holly Goldberg Sloan and illustrated by Mary Rosen (Rocky Road Books/Penguin Young Readers Group, 2015). Geared for readers in about 3rd through 5th or 6th grade, it’s the story of a baby possum, trained up with her twelve siblings in the ways of the world by their mama. Appleblossom is more curious than careful, though. When she falls down the chimney of a house full of humans, she puts her acting skills and accidental friendship with the girl of the house to great use in a warm and funny read. 

      On a sticky and sunny Sunday in the summer of 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland did something rivers should never do.
                                KABOOM!
    No one was surprised, surprisingly. It’s burned before, people said. It’ll burn again.
    Which was true. Since 1886, it happened thirteen times. In 1912, five people lost their lives. And the 1952 fire caused over a million dollars in damage.
                       from The Day the River Caught Fire
                                written by Barry Wittenstein
                                 illustrated by Jessie Hartland
                            Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
                            Books for Young Readers, 2023

    I disagree with Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when he alludes to humans’ need for a little magic to make the world right. We don’t need magic. We need information. We need encouragement. And we need determination. That combination makes magic.
    When William Shakespeare was born (April 23, 1564) the Thames River was so polluted that you could smell its stink for miles. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it caught fire and became part of a movement. The 1969 fire was not the Cuyahoga’s first fire. It was not even the worst one. (See quote above)    
    After the fire was put out, Clevelanders went back to work or home or school, 
    But in the wake of the monumental impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Houghton/Mifflin, 1962), a quiet movement had begun.
    “[T]he times, they were a-changin’.” 
    Time Magazine published an article about the fire in March, 1970. In December, 1970, the Cuyahoga River fire was highlighted in a cover story in National Geographic titled “Our Ecological Crisis.” 
    When Senator Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin visited Santa Barbara, California, in 1969, a massive oil spill had just ravaged the coast. Attention to the harm being done to our environment became his priority. 
    On April 22, 1970, under the leadership of Senator Nelson and his aide Denis Hayes, an environmental activist, the United States celebrated our first Earth Day. “An estimated 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. (earthday365).
    On December 2, 1970, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency to strengthen the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948. 
    First passed in 1972, The Clean Water Act has been amended several times. Through tighter restrictions, our water (and air) have become cleaner.
    In 2019, fish caught in the Cuyahoga River were deemed “fit to eat,” but after rollbacks in the first Trump administration, on August 25, 2020, the river caught fire again. Storm drains allowed sewage, toxins, and fertilizer to flow into the river during heavy rains. The 2020 fire started when a fuel tanker spilled its flaming contents into the river after a traffic accident. 
    An article in GreatLakesNow.com (2/13/24) reports that it depends on who you ask and what their standards are to determine if the fish you catch are safe or not.
    Until Lee Zeldin was confirmed as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on January 20, 2025, many stabilizing measures had been working.
    We need our governmental leaders to make and enforce laws and standards that protect us and the environment.
    We need environmental scientists, climatologists, and geneticists. They ask questions they think they know answers to, just to discover if they actually could be wrong. After all, it’s really effective to learn from our mistakes. Scientists have shown us that we continue to make many, and many dangerous mistakes. They show us that we human beings have had a profound affect on our environment, especially in the days and years since the Industrial Revolution.
    It is hard to convince people of that profound affect.
    Denial has taken hold especially in the time of Trump. The concept of denial is well-understood, well-documented, and much written about. We can be in denial about our own mortality or that of a loved one. We can be in denial about how the hot-fudge sundae we ate last night really affects our weight-control efforts. We can be in denial about a drinking or drug habit. According to psychological research, the enormity of the problem does not allow our brains to process its reality. 
    Here’s how the thinking goes: “It’s only one straw. The ocean is vast. My one straw won’t matter in the whole scheme of things. And I'm tossing it in the trash.” But somewhere down deep, we know the fallacy of this kind of thinking. It’s the cumulative effect that matters. 
    The fact of climate change is easy to deny. It is just too big to wrap our heads around. And millions of people are climate change deniers.
    Try to imagine, though, that our Earth will suffocate/drown/blow away or burn up if we don’t acknowledge climate change and start working diligently toward solutions. Together.
    So what is the solution? Just like any huge problem or project, we must break it into smaller, more achievable goals. We need to tell our government officials that we are concerned about our planet. We need to make collective decisions that will benefit all of humanity and all of our shared earth. We all need to be involved on whatever level we can be.
    With so much chaos, it’s difficult to focus on one enormous problem for an extended period of time. So much is so necessary.
    Mother Nature is nothing if not fair. She responds harshly to abuse, but is abundantly forgiving when we treat her with love and generosity.
    Let’s take one day off from worrying about wars, ICE detentions, and mass shootings. Let’s promise Mother Nature for just one day that we’ll be more cautious, more care-full, and more grateful for her gifts.
​    Happy Earth Day!

I’m reading Inheriting Edith by Zoe Fishman (William Morrow, 2016). Maggie’s former employer (she cleaned the house) died unexpectedly and left Maggie her house and everything in it including her 82-year-old mother. This one’s full of laughs, heartaches, and a two-year old. Recommended.
                      Be curious! (and plant a tree, or hug one)

And just trying to move the cabbage wears you out. So you take a long snooze.
And dream about sharing your cabbage with others.
                       from The Cabbage Seed’s Colossal Secret
                                    written by Karen M. Greenwald
                                          pictures by Alejandra Ruiz
                                     Tilbury House Publishers, 2026

    I love flowers and veggies and nurturing them in my small garden, even though I’m not very good at helping them grow. Their ground is a mixture of good garden soil mixed with home grown compost. Their water is drawn from our hand-pump-accessed well. 
    I talk to them and keep them company on a chair nearby. Sometimes we all listen to music or a story played on my Libby app.
    But mostly, they’re on their own. To enjoy the sunshine, weather, and pollinators. I’m on the lookout for the bad bugs and chase those away as best I can.
    If we’re all lucky, they will thrive throughout the whole growing season. Sometimes I even collect seeds with the intention of sewing them the following spring. Sometimes, I even do.
    This afternoon I caught a short blurb on the radio about a local seed library in Kirtland, Ohio, near Cleveland. Since it began 2-1/2 years ago, the Native Seed Libraries of the Holden Arboretum and the Cleveland Botanical Garden has been helping holdenfg.org (Holden Forest and Garden, HF&G) live its mission to “[connect] people with the wonder, beauty, and value of trees and plants, to inspire action for healthy communities.” 
    This year, their Seed Bank opened to the public in several locations throughout the greater Cleveland area. on January 19. Three free packets of native seeds are available per visitor to “community members, gardeners, and educators.” I’ll post hours on FaceBook and whether seeds are still available when I can reach someone (They’re closed on Mondays).
    “Native plants play a critical role in supporting pollinators, restoring habitat, and strengthening our region’s ecosystems,” says Kim Lessman, Seed Bank Manager at HF&G. “By making locally sourced native seeds freely available, the Native Seed Library empowers residents to be active participants in conservation, right in their own backyards.”
    Several branches of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County are pick-up sites for free seed packets from the Ohio State University (OSU) Extension of Mahoning County. Packets include carrot, lettuce, or sunflower seeds with instructions. Here's the flyer.
    You can find local seed banks with a Google search, just make sure you check the site carefully. Most are outlets for Cannabis.
    And buried deep in the permafrost on Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island in the Norwegian Sea about halfway between Norway and the North Pole is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It was expressly chosen for its remote location, far from war and terror as well as natural disasters. 
    It was opened by the Norwegian government in February, 2008 to preserve seeds from around the world to protect biodiversity in areas that may experience devastation of one kind or another. 
    From Norway’s government site,“[t]he vault hold the seeds of many tens of thousands of varieties of essential food crops such as beans, wheat and rice. These seed samples are duplicates of seed sample stores in national, regional and international gene banks.” 
    The Vault holds 642 million seeds, and has the capacity to reach 2.5 billion. Grains make up 69% of the holdings, 9% are legumes. The rest are a “wide variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and other plants [i]ncluding hallucinogenic plants such as cannabis and opium. 
    Seeds are usually tiny. Some are just small, but so many seeds (in their containers) need about 31 x 88-1/2 feet (9.5 x 27 meters) of space arranged in a rectangle divided into three long halls. See photos of the interior and the exterior.
    In February, 2026, the facility accepted its 69th deposit since opening on February 26, 2008. It now holds olive seeds for the first time, and accepted a total of 8,880 seed samples from 12 countries. Two of them, Guatemala and Niger, are first-time depositors. 
    The purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is to safeguard duplicates of seed samples from as many countries as possible to ensure the world’s future food supply. It backs up the over 1,700 world-wide gene banks which are vulnerable to natural disasters, war, and poor management and or lack of funding.
    Securing crop diversity allows researchers, plant breeders, and farmers to adapt agricultural practices to the climate crisis and reduce environmental deterioration making sure we can feed ourselves adequately. 
    They develop new and more resilient crop varieties that are nutritious, tasty, and environmentally sustainable.   
    From Karen Greenwald's author’s note in today's quoted book, I learned that she based her story of the colossal cabbage on a real 9-year-old girl whose real 40-pound cabbage fed a soup kitchen’s 275 hungry people, inspired a whole town, and launched Katie’s Krops, an organization that nurtures, trains, and supports young Gardners nationwide. Here's a link to Katie’s Krops FaceBook page.

I’m still reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I borrowed a copy from a friend, but needed to return it to her at my halfway mark. The reserve list from the library is thousands strong, which tells us a lot about the book. The main character is so well-drawn that I’m sure I’d recognize her if we could meet. Her friends, neighbors, authors, and others she writes to are just as real to me. It’s amazing how much we can learn about ourselves and others through fictional letters!
                    -—Be curious! (and remember to thank a farmer)

Let’s make music
Let’s have fun.
It’s music time
for everyone.
                                        from Let’s Make Music
                                  written by Alexandra Penfold
                                illustrated by Suzanne Kaufman
                        Random House Children’s Books, 2024

    Before I retired, we children’s librarians all had several trainings on language development and the process of learning to read. They were based on cutting-edge research analyzed by professionals at the American Library Association and brought to staff librarians across the US. 
    “What is the most important activity parents can do with their babies to help them learn to read?” That was my interview question for a new position at the Library    .
     Sing was my spontaneous but logical answer. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it made instant sense to me and I guess the administration, too. I got the job. 
    I was to be the liaison between the library and the community: parents, caregivers, and preschool teachers. I would share the research and demonstrate how children from birth to age 5 acquire language and the ability to read.
    ALA dubbed their program “All Children Ready To Read.” Our library renamed it “Baby Brilliant.” 
    I’ve always loved the sound and music of language and loved sharing that with young parents, preschool teachers, and little kids.
    Singing has words (real ones and nonsense, made up ones), playful or complicated rhymes, steady or complicated rhythms, and an endless variety of melody, all aspects of language children need to be familiar with before they can sound out words and attach meanings to them.
    But music and especially singing is so much more than its various parts. It is inextricably linked to our emotions and moods. 
    An aspect of music I wondered about for a long time was the seeming contradiction between the melodies of most “break-up” songs and their lyrics. Broken-hearted lovers sing songs in up-beat major keys. Why?
    Various sources I studied explained how the quick, happy-sounding tunes that convey sad lyrics help listeners feel less alone in their grief, more connected to others going through similar circumstances. Experiments have shown that the happy-sounding music overrides the sad story, so lots of times as we sing along, toe-tap, or head-bop we actually begin to feel better, less alone. 
    Some examples to remember or look up on Spotify or Pandora include Elvis’s “Return to Sender,” or Neil Sedaka’s “Breaking Up is Hard To Do,” or Gary Lewis and the Playboys singing “This Diamond Ring.”  
    Nostalgia and catharsis are two important feelings brought up by break-up songs. Our longing for the past and using music to help us relive some of our most difficult times can lead to a release emotions that have been building up. 
    Singing is even more effective than just listening. From the first note we sing, a chemical symphony begins within our brain. 
    OperaNorth, an organization from the UK, lists several reasons why singing is good for us.

• Singing releases endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine, chemicals that boost our mood and make us feel good about ourselves.
• Singing requires us to breathe, helps us increase our lung capacity, and engage the muscles around our ribcage.
• Breathing properly and with more awareness is good for releasing anxiety and helps transition us to a state of rest and relaxation.
• Singing can help improve mental alertness, memory and concentration. Singers focus on multiple aspects of music at once, engaging many areas of the brain simultaneously. 
• Music is a powerful tool used to spark memories during dementia care, often long after other forms of communication have become more difficult.
• Singing with other people helps build connections and feelings of togetherness. 
• Singing in a group can boost our confidence and fire up our self-esteem. 
• Good posture is a key factor in hitting the high notes. We naturally stand taller when we sing.

    Val Bastien in VoiceYourselfSinging (10/5/24) says, “Beyond the chemicals, singing allows for profound emotional release.” 
    My dad had a wonderful tenor voice. He liked all kinds of music, with words and without. I loved to listen to him sing. 
    Mom’s voice was strong, but not so much “on key.” She wanted to sing in tune, but must not have been able to hear music that way, so she couldn’t reproduce it. That didn’t matter to me, though. 
    She taught our Girl Scout troop lots of songs. There must be some trigger in some (or maybe even most) people that allows them to hear pitches in tune, in standard intervals, regardless the tones actually demonstrated. We girls always sang in tune, even though Mom couldn’t really teach us the “right” notes. I’m a little bit fascinated by this phenomenon but haven’t found a helpful explanation, yet.
    Singing (mostly in tune) helps me perk myself up when I’m driving home from a long-ish trip. I crank up the volume and sing along. I know lots of oldies.
    It must be the endorphins and serotonin and dopamine. 
    
I just started reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown, 2025). According to Anne Patchett’s blurb on the back cover, “Virginia Evans shows how one woman changes at a point when change had seemed impossible.” I expect it to be emotional, internal, and thought-provoking. I hope I’m right. I’ll let you know.
                              Be curious! (and belt out your favorite song,
                                         with reckless abandon, and friends)