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Have a musical memory that you’d like to share? Throughout the month we will post listener submitted recollections here and share a few on MPBN’s Facebook page. Send your memory to us at music@mpbn.net.CLICK HERE to hear a musical memory aired on Maine Public Radio and Maine Public ClassicalCLICK HERE to learn more about MPBN’s instrument donation projectOur listeners’ favorite music recollections:

Anita Rosencrantz, South Berwick

Fourteen years ago my older brother Steve died. I am one of 5 kids and even though none of us live near one another we are close in the way of large families. And Steve was only in his early 50s; he died unexpectedly of a heart attack — losing him was very painful.

My husband and I were on vacation at the time, cruising on our sailboat. We had just left the Fox Island Thoroughfare and were headed to Deer Isle when we got the radio call from the Coast Guard telling us that there was a family emergency. We headed back to Rockland; I hitched a ride home and drove up to Vermont.

For many years I never sailed through the Fox Island Thoroughfare — we somehow always seemed to go another direction; the wind never sent us that way. But several years after Steve’s death we were heading back to Rockland on a friend’s boat. It was a beautiful August day and we were going straight through the thoroughfare. Several people were on board, including Dan, a wonderful musician, who always has his guitar with him and had been playing it steadily across East Penobscot Bay. As we came into the thoroughfare, pretty much right where we had gotten the radio call, his teenage daughter Hannah popped up through the companionway and Dan said, “Hannah, sing something with me.” Hannah grumbled; I said how about some James Taylor? Dan nodded and Hannah, in her beautiful soprano voice started singing James Taylors version of “Song For You Far Away.” The refrain of that song is “This is a song for you, so far away, so far away, this is a song for you so far away from me.”

Except for my husband no one on the boat that day knew my brother or the story of his death or our radio call — “Song For You Far Away” was a total random choice. I was in the stern of the boat, crying of course (with my sunglasses on) — and we sailed through the Thoroughfare back to Rockland. But that song settled something — I said goodbye from a place where I needed to and was set free from a certain grief. And since then I have been back to North Haven and the Thoroughfare several times — and it has become its peaceful, joyful, beautiful place again.

And that is music that moves me.