We have the same children's book, Joey Feek and I. It is one of the first things I notice as the video of Joey singing a beautiful hymn in the midst of her painful, and as the world recently learned losing battleagainst an unrelenting cancer, begins to play.
She sits on the floor with her daughter Indiana in the corner of a hotel room that has become the make-shift play area for the litte girl--a semblance of normalcy for this sweet child crawling through the valley but knowing no evil.
The blue cover of the board book leaps out at me from my mobile screen, and I immediately know, though the title is, at first, not readable to me, that the book is the same one that graces my bookshelf...the same one I have read countless times to my daughters. "We have the same book," I think and my heart breaks for this family all over again.
Joey Feek and I are worlds apart it seems and yet here we are mothers with children who love Sandra Boynton's Barnyard Dance. I wonder if she reads it "straight" or the way I do with the cadence and rhythm of a seasoned square dance caller. Does she hear the music in the pages of the small book? Does she tap her foot to keep on beat, or does her finely attuned musical ear hear it altogether differently?
However she reads it, I am sure Indiana smiles with delight, loves it, and asks to hear it again. It is the same for my daughters because it is mommy's voice, not the actual words, that gives the book so much life.
Life...so precious yet so frail, and I think of the strange bookends to my day--a friend fighting for a reason to live, a stranger fighting to stay. I pray neither believes she fights alone.
I do not know how Joey's fight will end; I only know
-There is a God
-Who hears prayers
-And works miracles
So after "performing" Barnyard Dance tonight (or the Mickey Mouse Castle Ghost or Is Your Mama a Llama...or nothing at all because I fell asleep in the rocking chair) I will go before God with a humble prayer for a miracle for Joey and a thousand more Barnyard Dances for Indiana.
