The Girl in the Valley
Just completed Volume 7 and added it to the website the first week of July. Although you can listen to a one-minute sample of this song on the album page, I thought I’d put the whole song in this post. A song tells a story and, of course, a piece of a song is only a piece of the story. Below is a line from the lyrics and some background to the song, from the book that comes with each CD. This is a song I wrote in my daughter’s apartment in California, early one summer morning, with that blanket of coastal fog closing everything in. Some grow very weary of that summer fog, some are comforted by it. I have felt both, but now when I visit, it seems to help me think… and write. I used a picture of my daughter-in-law Sarah, on her wedding day, to get your attention.
…” Adrift on streets in pale moonlight, left still warm from her touch”
Somewhere in a field of tall grasses that rises slowly out of the San Joaquin valley and into the foothills, there is a handful of rubble, left from a stone foundation, of a little house. The family that lived there, I suppose a hundred and fifty years or so ago, was originally from Indiana. The man and his wife came out to California with a small group of other settlers, following his service in the Union army, after the Civil war. He built the house but died not long after, leaving his wife and a child to manage for themselves – hard times those.
Four generations later, she walked me out there to her family’s ruins. We lay there in the grass. We had a lunch and looked down on the little town below in the distance. Last I remember of her was that day and I left her to manage for herself.
THE GIRL IN THE VALLEY Copyright 2016 by Don Wright