My mother, Chris Mulford, died on August 23 of a stroke suffered on a hiking trip with my dad in Wyoming. She was 69. 

Since 2007, she has toured with me in the US as my road manager. She did most of the driving, ran CD sales, schlepped gear, made sandwiches, and reminded me to do my vocal warm-ups. More importantly, she was great company. She enjoyed spending time with the many people – family, friends, and folk volunteers – who welcomed us in their homes. If we stayed in a house with children and left while they were at school, she would write a thank-you note to each child, often with pictures. 

My mother was a trained and accomplished musician. Her musical life included professional orchestral music (double bass in the Oakland Symphony in California), social singing with family , friends, and the Girl Scouts, community theater (accompanying many musicals at the Players Club of Swarthmore) and countless hours playing the piano and the concertina for her own enjoyment. 

In 2007 when she first offered to come on the road with me, I had doubts. What self-respecting adult musician brings her mother along to carry her stuff? One tour was enough to show me that the shows got better when I had her help and support. Some fans may remember her calling out from the back of the room when I blanked on lyrics or misremembered the names of historical figures on stage. (Thanks, Mom.) After the first time she came with me to a booking conference, everyone I approached for a gig asked eagerly if I was bringing my mother.

In her professional life, my mother was one of the first generation of certified lactation consultants. She is loved and respected in her field, and many people remember how she used music to communicate at professional conferences. I went to several of these events with her; she would introduce me to her colleagues as the person who taught her to breastfeed. When she started coming with me to music conferences, it gave me great pleasure to intoduce her to my colleagues as the person who taught me to sing.

A moving car is a good place for story-telling, heart-to-heart talks, silliness, career planning, solving the problems of the world, or just being quiet. We had more good time together after I moved out of the US than we ever did when I was living three hours away in Maryland. I am profoundly grateful for every minute of it. I can do my own driving, carry my own stuff, set up my own sales table, and find my own shoes – but nothing will replace my mother’s presence on the road.

Thanks, Mom.

If you’d like to share your memories of Chris, or find out more about the amazing person she was, please visit her memorial site (in progress) at https://sites.google.com/site/chrismulfordmemorial/.

How did I wind up hooking up a milking machine to the udder of a styrofoam cow in Montgomery County, Maryland? It’s a long story, actually.

It started sometime around 1998, when a comment from B and an inaccurately-learned guitar lick turned into a song called “Party Cows”. For a while it became my signature piece. My co-workers at the print shop decorated my desk with Gary Larson cartoons. “Party Cows” was the working title of my first studio album until just before it went to the manufacturer. (“Don’t call it that,” a friend advised. “People will think it’s a novelty album.”) I changed the title to “Traveling Moon” – but I’d already drawn the dancing cows for the album art, and B had announced at a fund-raising concert that major sponsors of the project would have a cow named after them. The cows stayed.

And a good thing too. “Party Cows” is still one of my favorite tracks on the album. Cellist Diana McFadden made her instrument moo, moan, guffaw, and stumble drunkenly home, and B had his first cameo as the voice of an overturned frat boy. (He’s been somewhere on every album since.) By that time we’d moved to the DC area. Folk DJ Mary Cliff started playing the song during station pledge drives on WETA. When Mary moved to WAMU, so did the cows.

Which is how, some 10 years after its release, the song caught the ear of Barbara McGraw, the founder of the MOOseum. The MOOseum is a recently-opened attraction on the grounds of the South Germantown Recreational Park. Hearing that the land was slated for development, local citizens formed a non-profit to save the King Dairy Barn and turn it into a museum and education center. Everything in the displays was built by volunteers or donated. The collection includes a fascinating array of dairy and household equipment and a good deal of cow-themed kitsch. The craft area boasts a display of ceramic tiles made by elementary students. Barbara asked about offering “Traveling Moon” for sale in the MOOseum gift shop, which has stacks of cow-related items.

When I heard about the MOOseum, I knew I had to play there. I arranged to make a stop on my summer travels to deliver CD’s and do a short family-friendly set. The volunteers got me set up in the dairy building and I played for a mixed crowd of children and grown-ups. We started, of course, with “Old MacDonald.”

The drive to the MOOseum made me think of John Gorka:
There’s houses in the fields
No prayers for steady rain this year
Houses in the fields, there’s houses in the fields
The last few farms are growing out of here.

The King Dairy barn, stranded among soccer fields, parking lots, and mini-golf, is the last trace of the farmland that has been devoured by the suburbs of Washington. The area around it is all four-lane parkways, retail strips, and blocks of townhouses where every residence has a numbered parking space. Most of the trees are under 20 years old. I’m sure the schools are great, but there’s nothing in the environment to show kids where their food comes from.

I have to confess, when I first heard about the MOOseum, I was hoping for live cows – but I know that would be impractical for a volunteer-run organization that charges no admission and is open to the public only on weekends. Instead, the barn is populated by life-size models designed and built by Ed Burdette, a retired dairyman and livestock judge. They don’t feel like, sound like, move like, or smell like live cows – but they do give you a sense of just how huge a cow is, particularly if you are a small person. They have voluptuous eyelashes made out of paint-brush bristles, and one of them has internal plumbing for the milking demonstration.

My little cousin reports that her favorite thing about the day was milking the cow. Better than mini-golf even.

It was an excellent tour overall and as such required the writing of a lot of heartfelt thank-you notes. In the way of thank-you notes, they felt inadequate in both quantity and quality. While I was writing, I caught myself repeatedly using the word “delight” - a word I regard with mixed feelings. I think it is much misused.

“Delight” conjures up images of dubious food products which for one reason or another cannot be labelled with an honest term like “casserole” or “pudding”. Particularly when paired with ominous words like “low fat”, it translates as “we just made this up and we’re not sure what it is, but we want you to think you’ll like it.”

“Delightful” feels like part of the lexicon of good manners, used by those who are “charmed” and “pleased to meet you” whenever it is socially necessary to be so and not for a moment longer.

And yet there are situations where “delight” is the only word that will do to describe the unreasoned, uncomplicated good feeling that rises up without warning and takes you over completely. It is more urgent than “happiness”, but bubblier and without the deep, ringing overtones of “joy” (though “joy” is good too).

I once completed a walk through an art installation (Dale Chihuly’s handblown glass in the Pittsburgh Botanical Gardens) and realized that my face hurt because I hadn’t once stopped smiling for the last two hours. That’s delight.

The fall tour offered a lot of opportunities for delight. Delight visited me while walking through woods decked out in autumn colors, while standing on a hilltop in West Virginia and hearing the wind rushing over the forested hillsides, while eating soup in good company, while sitting up late jamming with excellent musicians. Delight is a mouthful of homemade grape jelly. Delight is doing a good show for a listening audience. Delight is waking up on a day off and realizing that my most pressing tasks are laundry and gratitude.

Delight is finite. Soup bowls are scraped clean. Songs end. Friends part. Clear fall weather gives way to winter darkness and uncertain road conditions. A nice tour itinerary is replaced by a messy desk and a waiting telephone. That's why it's important to recognize delight when it comes - whether it lasts for thirty seconds, or two hours, or over a period of days.

I hope that delight comes to you, and that however it arrives you will call it by its name, make room for it, and give it your full attention.

When B and I moved to England, we made much of how easy it would be to get to Continental Europe - but in four years, neither of us has been there except for work. This had to change, so we took an actual vacation and went to Brussels on the Eurostar train, by way of London.

Thursday morning in London, we went to the Borough Market, which we discovered by accident on an earlier trip. Both of us love street markets, and the Borough Market is a very fine one.

They open at two in the morning to sell wholesale to the restaurant trade. Later on they’re ready for the civilians. One can graze from stall to stall, sampling cheeses and daubing cubes of bread with olive oil, rose harissa, or unpasteurized butter with sea salt. Open-air roasteries serve up ostrich-burgers and wild boar to the lunch crowd, garnished with red-stemmed baby greens. The air is filled with amazing smells.

Running a market stall must be the grocer’s equivalent of busking: uncomfortable, chancy, really hard to do well, and eternally at the mercy of the weather. All the normal challenges of selling food - sourcing, transport, hygiene, avoiding spoilage - are complicated by the open-air setting. All sorts of weather can drive off the buyer and/or destroy the product. Add the challenges of running a temporary display that must be set up and broken down in one day. Then, unlike the departments of a supermarket, the individual stalls are in competition with each other - and each product is competing for a piece of the customer’s limited budget, capacity to carry stuff, and patience for waiting in line. Presentation and customer service become really important. So does having one thing in your stall that’s so unique and attractive that the customer will stop to look or taste.

When we bought leek and pine nut focaccia, it meant we didn’t buy the apricot walnut bread, even though that looked just as good. We bought German cheesecake at the place where it was prettiest (the fruit topping moist and jewel-like, the slices generously messy and falling apart a bit at the edges), which meant we then walked past the caramelized banana cake. The huge pyramid of seven varieties of multicolored tomatoes drew us to a particular vegetable stall - but what we bought there was a little tub of romas for £1.95. What a business.

After the market, we went to the National Gallery, where we (appropriately) visited a quartet of paintings that I fell in love with last time we were in London. They’re by 16th-century Belgian master Joachim Beuckelaer, a series called The Four Elements.

In each, the foreground of the painting is taken up by a market display; Earth is represented by fruits and vegetables, Water by fish, Air by fowl (and for some reason rabbits), and Fire by meats being prepared for roasting. In the mid-ground are scenes of daily life and in the far background are scenes from the Bible.

The food is gloriously presented, and the vendors as lovingly rendered as any of the saints and heroes in other canvasses. The religious scenes, by contrast, are vanishingly tiny. Sure, Christ walked on water, but this fish won’t get any fresher and these eggs won’t sell themselves.

Beyond that, the whole trip was pretty surreal.

England just gets generally strange around Midsummer. The days begin before 5 and go on until after 10, and everybody is a bit sleep-deprived, plagued by vivid dreams, dazed and dazzled by the sunshine. The girls in Manchester are wearing long floaty floral dresses and everyone is finding time to lounge around in outdoor cafes pretending to be real Europeans. It is the season of the Glastonbury Festival, Wimbledon, and the World Cup.

After coming home from Liverpool in the wee hours of the morning, we scraped ourselves out of bed and reorganized. (Several phone calls back and forth: Are you ready? No, me neither.) We drove through the beautiful countryside over the Pennines and up to Kirkby Fleetham (the second “k” is silent.) The village hall is on the village green, opposite the old smithy and the post office. It’s that sort of place.

While we sat on the picnic benches brushing up some harmonies, the air suddenly filled with bees. We retreated and watched as the swarm milled around the parking lot and then settled on a low branch of a nearby tree, hanging down in a seething black mass about the size of a dead cat. They stayed there all night and were still there the following morning. Lorelei’s pictures didn’t come out, but it looked a lot like this.

On Sunday, Paul recommended a scenic route home, but we opted to head directly back to the M62 motorway. Weekend traffic was moving briskly, as people tried to get home in time for the England match against Germany. We considered stopping for a sandwich, but pressed on. Which is why we came to a standstill with everybody else when the police closed the M62 so they could talk a threatened suicide down off the Scammonden Bridge.

People turned off their motors and opened their doors. They wandered along the shoulder with their cell phones. Rumors spread. It’s an accident. It’s someone threatening to jump. He’s already jumped. We’ll miss the match. People fumed. People settled in stoically. People led their small children into the tall grass to pee. We realized we had almost nothing to eat or drink in the car.

Meanwhile, the local drivers were filtering off the motorway on an emergency access route. Eventually we decided to try that and wound up on a two-lane road that was now doing the work of a 6-lane highway. The traffic was moving in fits and starts, but it was moving. Cars, camper-vans and lorries crawled over treeless green hills and past the scenic reservoirs of the Peak District. On either side of the road, cows and sheep grazed placidly.

The folks in front of us, realizing that the box of chocolates in their car would melt in the heat, walked back along the line of standing cars sharing them around. Some guys from a tour-bus, after a good deal of beer, decided to hike home.

As we crossed the Pennine Way (a major hiking trail), there was a National Trust car park full of model airplane enthusiasts and - Providence! - an ice-cream van. We pulled over and ate ice-cream while watching a guy wrestle his hang-glider into position for take-off. People around us had driven for miles to reach this spot that we couldn’t wait to leave.

It took us six hours to get home. I played a lot of the favorite tracks on my iPod through Lorelei’s car stereo - our own private edition of Desert Island Discs. England lost the match. He didn’t jump.

I am writing a commissioned song for a conference. I’ve never done this before, but I do have previous experience of writing on a deadline. One of the best ways to get writing to happen seems to be walking, so I’ve been doing that. Once the feet are moving steadily, lyrics start showing up.

I’ve been telling myself for several days that what I really needed to do was walk out along the canal to Salford Quays. It’s an ideal route for thinking: no distracting shops, no street crossings, no choices about which route to take. It’s a straight, narrow path with the canal on one side and a wall on the other. You just point yourself in one direction and go.

What I didn’t consider before I started is that it is gosling season. I hadn’t gotten far when I encountered a pair of Canada geese with four fuzzy yellow offspring, busily rootling in the greenery next to the path. I stopped to appreciate the cuteness. When I started walking again, the nearer adult goose hissed at me, showing off its pink tongue. Rather than press the issue, I waited for the whole family to wander past me at their own pace.

I passed under a bridge and ran into another pair of geese and five more goslings. More hissing. I tried walking past at a steady rate. One of the adults stuck its neck out aggressively and backed me up against the wall. I waited. The goslings nibbled the weeds. The midges found me and started biting. The song continued to not be written. The guardian parent hissed every time I moved, but seemed completely unconcerned when one of the goslings toddled up to forage around my feet. (I believe in the natural world, small animals that behave like this are commonly known as Lunch.) Eventually, moving slowly and pressed up against the wall, I managed to ease past the geese and keep going.

The next stretch of path went over a narrow ramp with a handrail. Padding toward me down the ramp was another pair with a brood of nine. I despaired.

Five standoffs later, I crossed the bridge over to the Manchester ship canal and had a better time of it. Eventually I sat and jotted down lyrics on a bench facing the water. Pairs of swans drifted by: huge, silent, white, elegantly curved - and, best of all, a long way away.

Thanks to Bill King.

Sometimes the audience is sparse. It happens. It can be the result of poor publicity, bad weather, gorgeous weather, flu season, sports events, holidays - or, as in Provincetown, simply the result of playing at a weird time of year in an area where people don’t know you.

At its best, playing for a small audience can be like sitting down with a few friends. This was one of those. The people who came really wanted to be there. I could stand on the stage with the lights in my eyes and pretend I was playing to hundreds - or I could step down off the stage without the microphone and talk to people one on one. I hope to go back to the Cape and play to a full room - but I don’t regret spending that evening with those eight people at all.

Another highlight in Provincetown was lunch at Napi's restaurant, where the doors to the toilets are labelled "Either" and "Or".