Wow, just wow.

The other night I was tucking my kids into bed and I noticed there was a small notepad under Anna's pillow. When I asked her about this, she grabbed it self-consciously.

She told me that she wrote songs down in the notepad. She said that sometimes songs would come into her head and then later, when she would get home, she would write them down. I told her that words often came into my head, too, and I would write them down as poems or stories. I asked her if she would read one of them to me.

She looked shy. She said she would, but that I might think it was inappropriate. I told her I doubted I would, and that I'd like to hear it anyway. She said she was in the bathroom at school the other day and the song just came to her.

Anna is seven years old.

She called the song “The deadness on the hill.”

The deadness that killed my people
Who are all I know
How I wish they would come back to me
Oh how I would never dare go over that hill.