Week 47: ‘family’ 
I tried so hard to capture ‘family’ during the week to no avail. Our lives are busy at present. I’m working 4 days a week, my husband works too, my eldest daughter Amy has been busy with job interviews and renewing her first aid as well as doing after school care, my second daughter Rachel has already moved out of home and is working as a chef at one of our local wineries and Ben is teaching PE at one of our local Catholic High Schools – hence the hard job finding a ‘family’ moment to photograph. 

For my birthday in June this year my husband surprised me with tickets to see Cat Stevens early December. On Thursday night my husband Pete asked me to get the tickets ready to take with us for the concert. Much to his surprise I replied ‘I don’t have the tickets, I gave them to you to look after (as this was what we did as he keeps things in order where I lose things). He replied ‘I can’t remember keeping the tickets and they’re not where I would keep them.’ This started a frantic search to no avail they never appeared. Thankfully we were issued another set of tickets via email and the others (if found) would be useless. This concert was last night. My husband and I set off on the journey from home at 10.30am and arrived at our destination at around 2pm, we hit lots of weekend traffic in Sydney so it made it longer. After having at least 3 weeks of glorious sunshine as we drove up the sky looked ominous. 

Normally we wouldn’t worry about the weather but the Cat Stevens concert was outdoors in one of the Hunter Valley wineries – ‘a day on the greens’ at night. Needless to say the Heavens opened and we were soaked. It didn’t matter in the slightest as we were decked out with a dark rain coat and bright yellow poncho – very bumble bee looking the two of us together. The rain seemed to make the crowd crazier and happier to be out in the elements, bare feet in muddy puddles, rain watering down wine and beer in plastic cups and wearing rain protective apparel that clearly wasn’t working as we blinked to see a few steps in front of us. Smiles all around. It was raining ‘Cats’ & no dogs (just my warped sense of humour 😀). 

He opened the concert with ‘Wild world.’ Well the weather was wet and wild but we didn’t care. When I think of rain immediately hear the conversation between the characters Allen Parrish and Sarah Whittle in Jumanji when Sarah says ‘well a little bit of rain never hurt anyone’ and Allen quickly replies ‘yeah right’ and prepares for a monsoon in June. Not quite a monsoon but it was more of an inconvenience that you couldn’t get your cameras out for fear of getting them wet and your glasses fogged up with the hot summer humidity so you couldn’t see through them. 

The rain had paused for one of my favourites. I got my mobile phone out to video the song in its entirety, I thought I’d pressed record but realised I hadn’t so only got a few short bars of the song ‘father and son.’ My husband luckily recorded it. I’m sure that song had even more meaning now that Jacob is gone. He’s never going to have those conversations like that anymore with his son but he will with Jacob’s brother Ben. The song that followed was ‘here comes the sun.’ Another important one as this was the song that played just after he’d taken his last breath and the sun was shining on his face the rest of the afternoon. Our wedding song was ‘morning has broken.’ A fitting song for anyone working in early childhood education was ‘where do the children play’ and a song for the years of our youth ‘remember the days in old school yard.’ Cat belted out one particular number that touched the heartstrings as the concert drew to a close – oh very young, what will you leave us this time, you’re only dancing on this earth for a short while…..will you carry the words of love with you, will you ride the great white bird into Heaven and though you want to last forever…you know they never will, you know they never will, and the good-bye makes the journey harder still. ❤️ The rain blended with my tears and no one could tell I was crying as I heard some of his favourite hits. 

This is my ‘family’ photo for this weeks prompt along with a quote I found on the Internet – Family is like music, some high notes, some low notes, but always a beautiful song 🎼 …….thanks for the music and songs tonight Cat Stevens.