piano

At some point in the not so distant past (depending on how you look at things), the old brown piano in my small dining room was a rollicking player piano.  I have to imagine it was quite the novelty, quite the excuse to party.  At some other point, the player mechanism was removed and it became just like all the other pianos.  At that I have to imagine, as well- was it irreparably broken?  Too impractical?  Too heavy?  Since then, though, it has been owned by music-minded folks who have admired it for its sheer pianoness and have kept it well- tuned and maintained.

So we got lucky when someone offered it to us, free- just come get it-so our kids could practice and plunk around. 

I was sick when it moved in.  I remember the phone calls and arrangements that I would normally have made being made around me as I looked on through a haze of pain, numbed by strange, powerful drugs.  Our house filled with men from all corners of our life one night.  They schemed and plotted and finally escorted in the brown piano.  Those brave enough patted me gingerly before they left to drink beer on the porch.

Many years ago, someone painted it.  Brown.  It had been the brown of cherry- stained wood but now is more deliberately brown- umber-y in the dappled light of our home.   It travels these days with a small mismatched bench, also brown (but ever-so-slightly-differently brown) that gamely opens to store sheet music. 

I find periodic inventories of the debris attracted to the piano pretty darn amusing.  It moonlights as a sideboard at certain extravagent meals which overflow from our table.  It also plays double duty as a rather large music stand for a young cello player who likes to use the piano bench when she practices.  When young folks set about table setting, they move all the mail, magazines, and unfinished drawings from the table to the top of the piano so if you lose something important, that's the place to look.  And if you happen to leave one of its hatches open, it may temporarily house a cat (until some inspired musician strikes his or her first chord!).

Right now the brown piano accomodates

- one china head, rag-patch-body doll, more recently dressed in silk, that belonged to a little farm girl named Adaline in Kentucky in the mid 1800's (my great-great-great....?)

-an abandoned robin's nest cuddling two blue eggs, from our front porch, on its way to the education director at the museum where I work

-a vase of slightly wilted flowers hanging on from Mothers' Day

-Suzuki Cello School, volume 2

-xeroxed sheet music for "Ladies Dance" and "Gypsy Tent"- cello, too, I'm guessing

-someone's Physics Main Lesson book on the floor under the bench

-a white paper and cellophane tape sun dial

-a clay/mud handprint slab made at some raucous sleepover

-a photo flip thingy with kid beach photos from a trip to Long Point 5 years ago

-a fishbowl containing a few handfuls of bright marbles and glass jewels for no apparent reason

-a multi-colored paper chain

-a zip lock bag of craft wire I brought home from the museum to wire the hamster cage closed

-two tinny bells from some cat collar or Christmas stocking

-a newly repaired marionette of a wizard

-a wittled stick

-a blue water bottle

It's a funny tally this- a wacky still life.  A collection of collections that our whole family adds to and takes from and walks past without noticing over and over every day.  Some days I bustle and clear and make sense of it only to have it filled again by dinner time. It takes a moment or two to see it as more than just clutter collecting on a vulnerable clear surface.  If I push really hard on the sentimentality button, I can love this mess.  I can write blogs about it.  Other days, it bugs me.  Most days, it just is.

It's a perfect place to hang one of those punchy homemaker plaques with some slogan or another, spunky as the next, about housework or family or women.  But you know, I'm not that kind of girl.  

So I'll just leave it.  Maybe I'll remove the bird nest and wire today, add something new tomorrow.  I started to recycle the now forgotten paper sun dial- but then I decided I liked it, so it's still there.

Not that we need it or anything.

It just is.