Day 9: Passions and Hobbies

Music fills our home. It is hard to tell the instruments my husband and I bought for ourselves from those that were gifts to our children. They intermingle and are played often. Whether it is my husband strumming a few chords, my son plinking around on the keyboard, or both of them banging on the drums downstairs, music of one sort or another fills our lives.

In thinking about how to best capture an image for today's Joy of Love assignment - photograph the hobbies or passions of a loved one - I was at a loss. I knew I had to photograph something to do with music - it overwhelms our small house - but I wasn't quite sure how. There are drums on every level of our house. There's a snare in the study on the second floor, a couple of home-made drums and various percussion instruments in the toy crate in the living room on the main floor, and then the drum set in the basement. Guitars on nearly every level, too. And somehow we ended up with a keyboard upstairs and one downstairs. We have maracas, a djembe, congo, and flutes. Some families like to fanatically follow sports teams. Ours creates music.

A perfect example of this happened this morning. My two year old pulled his stool over the the keyboard in our study, stretched across the keys to turn it on, and began plunking away. The morning light streaming through the blinds made lovely shadows over the keys as he randomly tickled his way up and down the black and whites. I suppose this is what makes photographing hobbies and passions easy - they are what we do with our time. They fill our lives. One of my favorite quotes comes from writer Annie Dillard. In her book on writing, she states, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing." I'm grateful that what we are "doing" is music. And we're doing it as a family.