Song of the month: 'How She Could Sing The Wildwood Flower'.

I heard this song on the freeway in the car, and everyone knows that the best place to hear a song is on a freeway in a car. It's nothing to do with the freeway or the car; but rather because you are captive and have nothing to think about except the distant horizon and the killer lilt in her voice. Talk about fall.

It was one of those interview programns on ABC; Mairi Nicolson talking to Christine Brewer, and they were playing her favourites. I had the children in the car, and they fell silent as the song that sounds like it was written hundreds of years ago floated out of the speakers. OK, it helped that I turned up the volume. The song was sung by a voice that sounded like five angels.

She was his sunshine
She was his moon and morning star

It's the kind of song that makes you turn the radio off at the end, so you don't lose it from your mind. We had arrived anyway. That open zoo near Werribee where they drive you around in a safari bus to look at rhinos and oryx and zebras and giraffes. Tracy had decided not to accompany us. I wonder why?

*

'How She Could Sing The Wildwood Flower'
by Emmylou Harris
From album All I Intended to Be

*

And this one is for Alexandra, for whom we held a tea party yesterday. The weather gods rent an approaching large black cloud in two, and poured one part down on Essendon and the other somewhere east of Lygon Street: and nothing on our garden but a few spots of light rain, like those five angels crying.

And yes: she is my sunshine and moon and morning star. She seems to be awake at most of those hours.