My Mother's Songs and the Childhood That Raised Me

When Sunday comes, I am reminded of the Sunday school I attended during my kindergarten years.
The time we spent singing hymns together still remains somewhere in my heart.
Perhaps that is why my mother often hummed hymns to herself.
Her singing voice naturally blends into the quiet atmosphere of Sunday.

I grew up in a dairy farming town in Hokkaido until I was in the fifth grade of elementary school.
In eastern Hokkaido, where there was little snow, I enjoyed speed skating on my way home from school, and in winter, my joy was sliding down the hill behind our house using cardboard as a sled.

My father was good at skiing, and whenever we visited Kawayu Onsen on family trips, he would always head for the snowy mountains.
As an elementary school student, I was a daddy's girl, and I once followed my father skiing, riding the lift back and forth.
The deep valley spreading out below and the swaying lift were very frightening to my young self, and that experience might be what leads to my current fear of heights.
Before that, I used to jump around on the stacked railroad ties of the tramway without a care, so perhaps people's phobias are born from unexpected experiences.

On the other hand, it was also around this time that I began flower arranging, influenced by my mother.
Admiring my mother in her kimono, I would go out to the hill behind our house to pick flowers when they were in season, go beyond the end of the tram line to pick butterbur, play house, and have her make clothes for my Tammy doll...
While playing in nature, I gradually began to awaken to my 'girlishness'.

Back then, even when we children ran around the fields and mountains by ourselves, we never worried about bears.
It was an era where we didn't fear nature, but lived alongside it and enjoyed every day to the fullest.
For some reason, when I was in elementary school, all my surprisingly close friends were only children.
We had sleepovers, played together, and spent irreplaceable time together.


When I moved to Sapporo in the sixth grade due to my father's job transfer, the friend I became closest to was also an only child.
I remember being surprised to see her wearing stylish clothes and thinking, 'Children in Sapporo are so mature.'
It was a fresh world for me, having grown up in nature until then.
Encouraged by that friend, I also got my first boyfriend. Even though we were still young, we started exchanging letters after graduation when he went to a different junior high school, and I remember feeling as if I had grown up a little in this new urban world.


However, when I became a junior high student, as I spent time at a school where many of the children were from families working at the agricultural experiment station, the sense of self I had developed while growing up in nature until the fifth grade gradually returned.
Along with that, my connection with the boy I had been exchanging letters with naturally faded away.
It wasn't that we forced it to end; it was likely that our paths diverged as we both grew.

On the other hand, not all the connections I made in the sixth grade were severed.
When one of my classmates moved to the same junior high school district, the three of us, including her younger sister, began taking the bus to elementary school together.
As we spent that time together, our friendship deepened, and I continued to interact with her for a long time as a childhood friend.
It was also she who told me about the recent lives of our sixth-grade classmates until she passed away.
She was a precious person who connected me to the memories of those days.

Also, even after I moved in my third year of junior high, I continued to take the bus for about half a year.
Whether in elementary or junior high school, I think that the casual daily routine of taking the bus deepened my bonds with my friends.

After that, I was able to spend fulfilling time with like-minded friends, such as going to the indoor skating rink in Susukino with my close-knit group from junior high, watching movies, or helping a friend who had a field harvest corn.

In high school, my days were filled with club activities, and we each began to walk our own paths.
Even so, a few years ago, I learned that a close friend from junior high school would stop by my house after her own club activities, talk to my mother, and then go home, almost every day during high school, without waiting for me to return from my club activities.
When I heard that story, my heart warmed, realizing that connections between people were quietly nurtured even in places I didn't know about.
When it rained, my mother would always come to pick me up at the subway station after club activities.
Until my mother passed away, I would think back on my junior high school days while singing the children's song 'Amefuri' (Rainy Day) with my mother, who had dementia.

She became a kindergarten teacher, and although I didn't become a school counselor, perhaps we were dreaming the same dream in the sense that we both aspired to work in a way that supports people's hearts, just like my mother.

Since my mother passed away, I have come to look back on my childhood many times like this.
That is surely because I am retracing, one by one, the scenery my mother showed me and the origins of who I am, which she nurtured.

My childhood, spent playing in nature, being loved by my family, and blessed with friends, is a precious treasure that supports me today.
I believe that those memories will continue to illuminate my life and connect the warm heart I received from my mother to the future.