courtesy of AvocetGeo

Living Madly: Lighter than Air

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

Joy can be hard to come by these days.

In my case at least, the last seven years have often felt like one long street fight. In early 2019, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The following year, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, my daughter’s college graduation was cancelled and I was laid off from my job as the managing editor of a regional magazine due to lack of advertising revenue. My mother died in September 2020, followed by three of my close friends dying a month apart in 2022. My husband was laid off from his job in 2024 after the software company he worked for was purchased by a private equity firm. Both of my cats died just eight days apart this past May. And since last February, I’ve been battling a nasty antibiotic-resistant infection that refuses to quit no matter what I, or my doctors, throw at it.

When you factor in the unpresented political and social upheaval that has become a more or less ordinary part of our everyday lives, rampant inflation, high unemployment, and the malignant, unhinged cast of characters currently running the federal government, it’s a wonder that anyone gets out of bed in the morning.

Life has a heaviness to it.

But like an unexpected visit from a dear friend, joy still sneaks up on me sometimes. I often find it while I’m hiking: a newly hatched butterfly drying its wings; the burble of a cold, fast-running brook; swirling snowflakes suddenly filling the air on a dark winter day.

And then there’s music. For most of my life, it has been my savior, a signpost on the road to oblivion that convinces me to turn around and start walking in the opposite direction.

When I dropped out of high school at age sixteen, I did not have the courage or the language to express my anger and disillusionment at the brokenness of my family. But I found a refuge in the heavy metal music scene of the late 1980s. It’s screaming guitars, hard-driving percussion, and powerful lyrics gave me a safe place to unload my rage and disappointment. I made friends at concerts—people my age who were just as pissed off as I was, for many of the same reasons. Some of them are still my friends today.

That music helped me clear my head enough to think my situation through. It made me realize that the only person who could save me, the only person truly responsible for my happiness and wellbeing, was me. I went back to school, completed two years of academic work in a single year, and graduated with my class.

These days, my musical tastes tend to be less aggressive. I listen to classical music during the day while I’m working and often in the car. Sometimes, when I turn on the radio, I can actually feel the stress leaking from my bones. I’m able to unclench my jaw, a bothersome tic that’s become so habitual I often don’t realize I’m doing it.

For the last twenty-five or so years, I’ve also been an enormous fan of traditional and roots Celtic and Québécois music. I have a crate of CDs in my living room and dozens of digital albums on my laptop and phone, but one of my favorite things in the world is seeing traditional bands perform live.

This isn’t just because trad musicians tend to be extraordinarily talented, creative, and thoughtful. As a former journalist and student of history, I appreciate the research and time that goes into collecting and rearranging music that, in many cases, is centuries old. The stories these old songs tell are almost always still relevant, tales of love, loss, and, occasionally, unbridled happiness. I love the humanity in these pieces, to be reminded that hardship and heartache have always been part of people’s lives, and that we have always, somehow, found reasons to persevere.

Often, there’s also an element of magic in this music, a sort of alchemy resulting from the combined passions of individual musicians playing together at a single moment in time. More than once, I have sat in a concert hall and felt time stand still as a single holy, transcendent melody—so much lighter than the air that carries it—washes over the room, leaving in its wake a surge of pure joy.

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Émilie-Noëlle Provost is the author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award, American Fiction Award, and American Legacy Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Visit her at emilienoelleprovost.com.