The music box arrived in a box of my grandmother's belongings, wrapped carelessly in a dish towel, as if whoever packed it hadn't understood what it was. It was small, wooden, slightly warped at one corner, and when I wound the tiny key, it played a simple, slightly off-key melody I did not recognize at all.
I kept it on a shelf mostly for sentiment, not thinking much more about the tune itself. Little by little, though, I started noticing something strange. My mother, visiting one weekend, hummed a melody while washing dishes that stopped me completely — the same tune, note for note, though she swore she had never heard the music box play.
Curious, I asked my aunt, the oldest of my mother's siblings, whether the melody meant anything to her. She went quiet for a moment, then said of course it did — it was the lullaby every baby in our family had been sung to sleep with for at least three generations, passed down by ear, never written anywhere, not to mention never once mentioned to any of us directly as anything special.
As good as forgotten, apparently, since none of us realized we already carried it somewhere. My aunt explained that our grandmother had sung it to my mother, who — without ever consciously learning it — must have absorbed it deeply enough to sing it back to dishes, decades later, without knowing why.
Come to think of it, I realized I had likely been sung the very same melody as an infant myself, long before I could form any memory of it at all. When my own daughter was born the following spring, I found myself humming it too, without deciding to, the tune arriving before the memory of where it came from ever did.