I turned seventy-one last Tuesday. Wouldn’t you know it, same as clockwork for the past twenty years, there it was on the front doormat at six in the morning. A small wooden box. No card. No wrapping. Just a little box with a brass winding key on the side.
I sat down on the steps and wound it up.
The tune that came out stopped me cold in the hallway. It was a lullaby. Not just any lullaby. The one my grandmother used to sing to me in her rocking chair back in 1960. I’d never heard it anywhere else. Not on a record, not on the radio. Just her voice, low and soft, rocking me to sleep at her house on Sunday afternoons. I don’t think she even knew she was humming it half the time.
And here it was, coming out of a little wooden music box on my seventy-first birthday.
I set it on the kitchen table and just stood there staring at it. My hands were shaking, honestly. Because after twenty years, I knew every track of every box that had come before. There were carols and show tunes and old movie songs. Nothing special, nothing connected to me personally. Just pretty melodies that I’d wind up once or twice and then put on the shelf in the den.
That shelf has twenty boxes now. Every year I’d ask around. I’d knock on the neighbors’ doors.
I’d stop the mailman. I’d call my daughter and ask if she knew anything about it. She always laughed and said it must be a secret admirer. My son suggested I set up a camera. But I never did, because honestly, part of me liked the mystery. It was like having a little birthday fairy.
But this year was different. This lullaby was from my own history. I stood in the kitchen and felt tears coming. Nobody alive should know that tune. My grandmother died in 1972. I never had children of my own, not that she ever got to meet. I never sang it to anyone. So how could this box have that specific song?
Then I noticed something I’d never seen in twenty years. A small folded piece of paper tucked under the felt inside the lid. My heart started pounding. I actually almost didn’t open it. I guess I was scared of what it would say.
I pulled it out. The handwriting was old-fashioned, shaky but careful. It said:
“I heard her sing it too, that same night in September. She told me she’d hum it to her own babies one day. I never forgot. I remember her every birthday. I hoped you still did too.”
And at the bottom was a name. A woman’s name I hadn’t thought about in fifty years. Margaret. My grandmother’s best friend. She lived two doors down from us when I was a kid. I remember her coming over for coffee, sitting on the porch with my grandmother, laughing. She moved away in the late sixties and we lost touch.
I sat there on the kitchen floor for a long time. I’m not sure how long. I held that note in my hand and thought about Margaret. She must be in her nineties now, if she’s still alive. And she remembered that one night in September when my grandmother hummed that tune and said she’d sing it to her babies. That meant me. She was singing it to me before I was even born. And Margaret held onto it for sixty years.
Every single box on my shelf was her way of saying we remember. I never figured it out because I only asked people in my own little circle. I never thought to ask the old lady two houses down from when I was six.
I still haven’t called her. I’m not sure I know what to say. But I pulled out the old phone book my aunt left me and I looked up Margaret’s last name. She’s still in the county. I’ve got the number on a sticky note next to my coffee maker.
Tomorrow morning I’m going to wind that lullaby box one more time and I’m going to call her. Right now I’m just sitting here in the quiet, with twenty little boxes on the shelf, feeling like somebody has been watching over my birthdays my whole life.
That lullaby is inside my head now, and it’s not going anywhere.
I sat there on the kitchen floor a while longer and let that tune play in my head again. I remember exactly how my grandmother’s voice sounded when she sang it. It was high and thin but soft, and she’d pat my back with her hand as I drifted off. Her hand was always warm. She smelled like lavender soap and coffee. That was sixty years ago, and it still comes back clear as anything.
I remember once I asked her what the song meant. She just laughed and said, “It means the moon is tucking the baby in for the night. Nothing more to it.” She never told me where she learned it. But it was hers and mine. And I guess it was Margaret’s too.
That note in the box keeps coming back into my mind. The part where she said “I hoped you still did too.” Did I still remember my grandmother? Of course I do. But I think she meant more than that. She meant did I still remember that night, that feeling, that promise of humming to babies. And I didn’t really, not until this lullaby came back into my life. I’d tucked it away for so many years. I had my own kids, my own life. My grandmother was just a sweet memory I’d pull out on holidays. But Margaret had been holding the full story for sixty years, keeping it alive through those little boxes.
I got up off the floor and went to the shelf. I picked up the first box from twenty years ago. A little square one with a faded floral print. I wound it. It played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I wound the next one. “Edelweiss.” They were all little pieces of her world, the songs from her time. And this year she finally told me why.
My hand is still shaking a little when I look at that note. But I’ll be honest, it feels good to know. It feels like my grandmother wrapped her arm around me one last time and said, “See? She never forgot either.”
That lullaby is inside my head now, and it’s not going anywhere.
