Many Journeys by Elleth

Parse

Of songs and joy - young Macalaurë reflects on his parents.

My mother is not a singer, and truly, if I listen with my musician's ears, I easily find her voice too ordinary for song. Sometimes the tones stray into octaves that make me, proclaimed as second only to Elemmíre of the Vanyar (some say that I will overtake her soon), wince. Yet she sings constantly, when she believes herself alone, or when the presence of her children is momentarily forgotten. We are always welcome in her workshop, but when she is crafting we might as well be pieces of furniture, such is the attention she pays to us then. If we do not disturb her, we can watch for hours. Sometimes we can hear her hum softly to herself, sometimes sing a full-blown song, often of my making. “Uinen's Tangled Hair“- a song I made when I was younger and still silly, is her favourite. She likes the silly songs best overall, at any rate, they are the ones she sings most often, and when she doesn't start laughing so she has to put her tools down in order not to spoil her work, she sings them with some sort of effortless joy that baffles even me and makes the song far better than many could render it, despite technique, voice and talent.

Father is the only one to startle her out of her rhythms - when he enters the workshop, even when he has not yet said a word and she shouldn't even know he is present, I have seen her eyes light up as though a stray spark of Telperion settled into them. (Carnistir looked at me strangely when I thought that the first time, and confused everyone with his comment. “I bet that hurts. But the light - it's not only in the eyes.”) When father enters the workshop, she stops working and goes to greet him, tucking the tools away into the pockets of her apron as she crosses the distance to him.

Once she was fingerpainting with Ambarussa, and forgot she had paint all over her hands – father looked like he had jumped face-first into her palette. Mother used each finger for a different color, so he had those all over his cheeks, middle finger-red in the hair she tucked behind his ears, a green smudge (from her index finger) on the tip of his nose, and a smear of the same color on his lips. Mother had that one, too.

And when she looked at him, she said “oh”, clapped her hands over her mouth, and started laughing. When father joined her, we knew this would not cause yet another argument.

It felt like a moment in a song.

Chapter End Notes

Credit where credit is due - Caranthir's gift in this ficlet is of course based on Dawn Felagund's interpretation of him.

parse PAHRS, transitive verb:
1. To resolve (as a sentence) into its component parts of speech with an explanation of the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part.
2. To describe grammatically by stating its part of speech, form, and syntactical relationships in a sentence.
3. To examine closely or analyze critically, especially by breaking up into components.
4. To make sense of; to comprehend.
5. (Computer Science) To analyze or separate (input, for example) into more easily processed components.

(from www.dictionary.com, emphasis mine.)